- Explain Marketing To Dean
Thu, Jul 04, 2024 12:45PM • 1:49:01
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
marketing, ai, cmo, sales, company, people, write, problem, prospecting, content marketing, clients, talk, year, event, good, topics, business, marketer, sales enablement, create
SPEAKERS
Melanie Asher, David Poulos, Dean Waye, Whitney Hahn, Russell Lundstrom, Doug Hunter
Dean Waye 00:00
That’s okay, so, David, here we go, I have a list, I’m writing this book, right? Called what your CMO is trying to do. And it’s for founders and CEOs who did not come up on the marketing side. And either admit that they really don’t know much around marketing, or they admit that they’re, they know just enough to be super dangerous. And so the first part of the books done, I look, today, it’s coming up at 300 People have reviewed it, you know, and help me out with, so that’s great. But I’ve got a list of special topics. And so for this list of special topics, what I’ve done is I’ve invited a bunch of chief marketing officers and fractional chief marketing officer, to help me out to write individual sections. So I’m just gonna, it’s gonna be a long list, so I apologize, right? But there’s a list of special topics. And I’m just gonna read them out. And when you find one that you’re like, I can tell you all about that, Dan, and you can explain it to me like I’m a nine year old, then we’re in business or cooking with gas. Okay. So you just stopped me when we get to a topic where you’re going to crush it. You’re in marketing. So I know, you’re a super optimist and like, the way it is, right? It’s like, it’s like, actually, in the book earlier up, it says something about how marketers are naturally optimistic, just like salespeople are, if they weren’t, their job would kill them.
David Poulos 01:32
I have to agree. That’s true is anything ever said, Okay, so here are the top.
Dean Waye 01:40
They’re not in any particular order. But the first two are sort of two sides of the same coin. So the people side of marketing, all customers are people first. The people side of marketing, the marketing team, you know, very individuals and like what they need stuff, marketing as the hub of the business, digital marketing, marketing strategy, campaigns, AI in marketing, measurements, KPIs, metrics, and stuff, inbound or content marketing, event marketing, the CMO is the linchpin, and marketing for prospecting
David Poulos 02:17
events all day long, I can talk on almost all of those quite competent. For what I’m about right now. All
Dean Waye 02:26
right, explain to me, where events fall in sort of the spectrum of marketing, what they deliver that other kinds of marketing might not. And some of the, like, the core thing that a founder or CEO should know about events and marketing.
David Poulos 02:47
The stage is yours. Let’s start from the back what you can expect from Event Marketing, if your company is still sales driven, but has a marketing component to it. This is the golden goose, because this is the best time you’re ever going to get all of your customers, all of your competition, and everybody else that you have to deal with in one room at the same time. So any kind of event, whether it’s a tradeshow or whether it’s a conference,
Dean Waye 03:11
that’s marketing, right there. That’s that’s
David Poulos 03:15
the way to do it. You’re never gonna get all those people in one room at the same time to be able to talk to them, demonstrate to them, learn from them, share with them, bond with them. It’s It’s It’s indescribable how good this can be if it’s carried out correctly. So let’s start there. If you’re a founder, and you’re still connected to the brand, in other words, you are the face of the brand still is the founder. And most companies under say five to 10 million probably are that way, you have an obligation to get out in front of an audience and make sure they know you are still pushing the same direction you’ve always pushed or the one you want to. That is your job, you are the face of the place you make it visible, they’ve connected with you now make it count. That’s really the best way I can describe it. Now events don’t have to be big events can be very small. I can get 10 clients in a room. If you’re running an ABM program, this is dynamite for you. sit around a table with 10 of your best clients and chat with them for an hour over dinner. See how much you learn. See how much you want to change. See how much you want to get better to help those 10 clients. Now sit down with 10 prospects over that same dinner and listen more carefully. How much more you want to learn knowing what your clients already like about you how you can present it in their language in their minds in their understanding. So much more powerful. You can’t imagine how much better you’re going to get that second dinner by going to the first one. So that’s that’s one of the power of events. The other is you get to take shine from the venue and some of these small things to 234 100 people. You gather them in a really glamorous place and you put on a dynamite presentation. That’s an event. It’s not just a conference. It’s something to behold and it’s something to hold dear. It’s something to charge for if you do it right And you can learn an incredible amount doing that. Now, if you go the other end of the spectrum, big trade shows huge conferences, national event type things. If you’re an exhibitor at that event, you owe it to yourself to put the best foot forward because it is one of the most expensive marketing endeavors you’ll ever encounter. But it also pays back tremendous dividends if you do it properly. Because again, you’ve got more people in one place than you’ll ever get to. If you own your own jet, you could not generate this kind of activity in a short period of time for the price.
Dean Waye 05:32
So how do you how do you do it wrong?
David Poulos 05:35
spend too much on the wrong things, mostly booth space unless you’re the leader in your category. And I mean, the undisputed leader. buying too much real estate is a very common problem with these because it makes you feel like you’ve got some power and that you, you lorded over the other exhibitors, because you’ve got this giant space to fill. First off, you’ve just quadrupled your cost because you have to fill that space. Plus, you’ve got to pay for it in general, you now you’ve got to fill it with people, which are even more expensive. So by the time you tap all that up, it’s talking about a major, major, major expenditure. And the guy with a 10 by 20, who really did some very effective pre show marketing, and has a unique product and understands his customers better is going to kill it. He’s going to He’s amazing. He’s going to have lines, you’re going to look and you’re going to see his tchotchke sticking out of everybody’s bag on that show for audit through, he’s going to have used maybe a two step attractor to get people into his booth and into the hands of his salespeople who have been specifically trained for this, by the way, not just their best salespeople. In fact, they’re probably the worst to have on the floor. And don’t bring the receptionist just because she’s cute. train your staff please, to do what they’re supposed to do. I’ve seen this 1000 times training your staff and selecting them carefully is one of the most advantageous things you can do. And it costs you nothing. It’s free. You already paid.
Dean Waye 07:00
Okay, so I’ve worked for in marketing, and I’ve worked in sales, and I’ve carried a bag, right? As they say, and I’ve never I’ve been I’ve worked booths, not a lot, but I’ve worked some booths I’ve never, not only have I never been trained, I don’t even I’m sure no one in our company also in the booth was ever trained. How do you train people for a booth, I’ve literally never heard of that.
David Poulos 07:26
There is a way you need to look at that show floor to look at those aisles to eyeball those people going down, and to attract them to you in a way that is inviting, that is attractive, that is interesting and engaging without being pushy, or naggy or anything else. Plus, if you’re on the sales side, you have to look at what your goals are for the event. If you’re there to actually close leads, then you’re going to be looking at a very different sales proposition than you are gathering leads. If you’re just trying to find out whether somebody’s interested in fill out a lead card, so you can follow up with them later. Because the sale is a multistep or it’s a very, very large dollar amount or whatever you’re talking about. That’s a very different set of circumstances and a different set of training than the guy who’s selling $20 brooms that of a booth at Home show. Very, very different setup, very, very different transaction. Again, you’re looking to form relationships long term, with people who are real buyers. You’re simply sitting in that booth gathering information from your peers and your colleagues in your industry. That’s what you’re there for. It’s to build those bridges, because you’re going to go back to them later, you’re going to set up another meeting, you’re going to set up a demonstration in someplace more suitable. I produced one trade show where it was a very large national or international show geared towards the printing industry. And we would fly in literally with helicopters, in some cases, these massive, massive print machines. I mean, huge, huge, huge presses. It took up half a city block some of them. And those kinds of rare are demos are extremely rare. Nobody’s going to put in the money to bring in you know, the aviation show. You land one helicopter, not nine models. Okay, it’s a big, big show. The Ag show does this do they bring in huge tractors and cedars and fertilizer and all that stuff? Beautiful demos, do you really think anybody signs a contract for a combine at one of those things? No, they do not. You’re developing a relationship and it’s a good place to showcase your product. But most shows are not on that scale. You’re not going to have that huge demo right in front behind you. You’re not going to bring your entire product line. You’re gonna bring paper you’re gonna bring stuff to show, you know, bring video you’re gonna bring tchotchkes they’re gonna go home and hopefully they’ll remember you long enough for that Follow up. Follow up is critical. The best are the ones where they follow up right then in there. I’ve been foods as An interested buyer and honest buyer. And by the time I got done talking to that salesman, and we close out our afternoon, and I said, I’ll get back to you and walk 10 feet down that aisle, my phone pinged with his follow up. And his follow up didn’t contain. Hey, nice to talk to you. Right contain. Here’s the product we talked about. Here’s the information you requested from me, here’s what you need to know, in order to go to the next step. And oh, by the way, here’s my schedule. That’s a follow up and in 20 seconds, no less, you got to have that stuff prepped and ready. Right.
Dean Waye 10:31
All right. I mean, I’m sure there are businesses where they, they make almost all of their money or get all of their top of funnel stuff through events, like one or more events per year, right? Absolutely.
David Poulos 10:43
There are lots of them. I work for financial advisory that their main top of funnel filler, one services firm, dinner set. That’s right, you can do it for them to dinner seminars, sit people down over a steak for an hour and a half and explain how this all works. You’ll close a third of them, if you follow up carefully, and it was the right audience to begin with. That’s not bad. Those numbers work extremely well. Yeah.
Dean Waye 11:10
All right. And if I’m okay, so like, I’m the CEO of a small for ARMA, founder, right? Of a startup or something, let’s say, like, what are the like, I’m not in charge of marketing. I’ve hired a CMO or freshers who most like you know, they’re supposed to take the ball are supposed to run with it. What like, two things. What I talk about when I check in with it, just to make sure that like they’re getting like the most the core basic two things that are underway. Right? So like, they’re going to there’s going to be an event next week, CMO is going to go and some of the salespeople, like what are the like the two things that hey, like, just to be sure, like, you know, put myself at ease. You’ve done X and you’ve done y, right? What are those two things?
David Poulos 11:52
One, I’ve made sure the guest list is correct and proper and confirmed. If you’re doing something that size, you want to make sure that everybody on that list is going to show up, you follow up relentlessly, without using the F word of course, and you want to go back and make sure that those folks have confirmed it’s on the calendar, everything is
Dean Waye 12:10
in place. These are the meetings that you set you ahead of the event, even
David Poulos 12:14
a hospitality suite, if you’ve invited a bunch of people with a big show, it’s certainly follows. If that CEO walks with an empty hotel room, he’s not going to be happy with you. So a confirm the guestlist be make sure that the people that are actually there are as close to the decision maker as you can possibly get them. Because if he wastes his time and money, talking to people that can’t buy, you’ve just killed the biggest opportunity you have. Yeah.
Dean Waye 12:39
Okay. All right. All right. Yeah, there are other topics that you want to tackle and we want to take a breath, and we’re gonna pick on Russell for a second have Russell explain it to me like I’m dying, by all means. Okay, Russell. Hello.
Russell Lundstrom 12:56
Good afternoon.
Dean Waye 12:57
How are you? Well, I’m getting educated. I’ve got these like topics, right specialty topics for this book.
Russell Lundstrom 13:06
That’s why I’m here and maybe learn something.
Dean Waye 13:09
So I’m going to read out some topics. And you should just pick whichever one. You think you you know, so Well, you could explain it to me a nine year old who just really trying to just understand the basics. Okay. So, actually, since I’m already scrolled to the bottom, I’ll start at the bottom work my way up. marketing’s overlap with prospecting the CMO as the linchpin, event marketing, inbound content marketing, measurements and metrics, KPIs. AI in marketing, campaigns, marketing strategy, digital marketing. Marketing is the hub of the business. The people side of marketing, the marketing team, or the people side of marketing. All customers are people first. I’m
Russell Lundstrom 14:03
not sure you left anything out there. I didn’t hear direct mail. Let’s talk about the role of the
Dean Waye 14:09
CMO. Oh, actually, I’m okay with direct mail. I love direct mail. I
Russell Lundstrom 14:14
write direct. I love it, too.
Dean Waye 14:16
I get paid to do that. So that’s awesome.
Russell Lundstrom 14:18
Yeah, I know. But I wouldn’t say I’m an expert on that subject. I’m a returning expert on that subject. But I do understand the CMO role and world quite well. All right.
Dean Waye 14:38
All right. Thank you for giving me make that note. Excellent. All right. Cmo was linchpin. Right.
Russell Lundstrom 14:45
Yeah. So in a business and I’ve worked with 1000s of CEOs. The CEOs role is to set the vision and make sure the company is going to reach that vision right then you have three sub roles under that you’ve got the CFO, they’re in charge of finance and accounting, making sure the business has the money to do what it needs. Then you have COO, which is the Operations Officer, who’s in charge of making sure the ship stays afloat. And then you have the CMO chief marketing officer, and they’re the ones that are in charge of the nine year old explanation is using this limited batch of resources, time, money, my opportunity, cost, bandwidth, how do I take this limited pot of resources and get this ship to the port, the horizon, the goal, the objective, and that’s my only job. And I do
Dean Waye 15:52
the most with the constraints that
Russell Lundstrom 15:54
you have to get to the reg. It’s the most efficient and effective use of resources.
Dean Waye 15:59
And I’m certainly right and constantly.
Russell Lundstrom 16:04
Yes. So it’s, it’s, it’s much more like the world of fractional CMOS has blown up recently. Yeah. And I see and talk with a lot of people who are experts in their marketing strategies, who all of a sudden now are saying, Oh, well, I can do the fractional cmo stuff. But they have no idea how to read a financial statement. And, you know, determine where is the business in terms of health, what is the lifetime value of a customer, what is my budget, my budget should not be just some flat rate, right? pulled out of the sky, based on revenue, right? You need to know quite a bit more like the skill levels of a CMO is actually pretty well different from those of an expert marketer. And, you know, that’s in simplest forms, you are the guiding principle of the use of resources to achieve the objective.
Dean Waye 17:03
Okay, so what happens when you’re not good at it? What happens if fire ammo or fractional CMO? I’m the founder and CEO. Well, it’s the wrong one. Yeah,
Russell Lundstrom 17:15
this is the bane of my existence. This is my real What’s that French word? The reason for being not even to try? Yes, there you go. So I there’s an entrepreneurial organization called the EO, which I’ve been a member of for 20 years, all business owners, seven figure business owners, and through the last 20 years, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to a business owner, including last night, who says, you know, we hired XYZ marketing company, paid him 5060, whatever, $1,000 a year, and got nothing for it. And that was the story that I was just consumed with. Back in 2019. Because these are my friends. How can we fix this problem? And I think it comes down to the world of marketing has unlimited opportunities. And when you combine limited resources with unlimited opportunities, therein is where you run into problems, right? How do you make those decisions as to which opportunities to run with, as David was mentioning, events are fantastic. But is that appropriate for my business? At this stage in time of my business, it’s not appropriate for every business.
Dean Waye 18:31
Alright, so what are some signs that I’ve hired the wrong CMO or fractional CMO? And how long does it take me normally, to be sure that I’ve hired the wrong one?
Russell Lundstrom 18:41
Well, the first and foremost sign is if you hire a marketing professional, and they haven’t clearly asked you what is the objective? And what are the metrics that you’re going to determine me to be a success or failure. You’ve got the wrong marketer. I have a couple of I do some unofficial coaching. And I’ve got a student who works in Europe, and they just pay him every month his clients do, and there’s no metrics and no goal lines. And I was like, Well, how do you know if you win the game or not? And how do you know if they’re gonna fire you tomorrow or not? And he’s like, I just hope, you know, it’s that spray and pray method of, of marketing. So that’s pervasive in the marketing world.
Dean Waye 19:25
Right. We just like you get an agency to do your whatever do you do about and you just sort of you pay every month and you just hope that it works?
Russell Lundstrom 19:33
Yeah. So the simplest, I mean, at the end of the day, I think all a CEO cares about from marketing. Up until maybe 1020 30 million in revenue is leads. I just need my sales team to be on the phone. Good leads for sales. Yeah. And, and really, it’s a step beyond sales. It’s revenue in the bank. It’s the actual money sales, right? You want to get To the high profitable clients who make you money and don’t cost you money and are not a pain in the butt to work with. And that’s really all they care about. They don’t you know, the and so your job as a CMO is to Okay, first thing we need to define is what are the objectives, right, and whether you’re talking 369 12 months, 24, whatever. Those objectives have to be clear as a bell, and you if they come to me and give me an example of me working with a software company right now that has a goal of reaching their brand new startup, but they want to have a million dollars in new MRR by the end of the year. So, me as the CMO, I have to first determine what’s the first number I have to determine?
Dean Waye 20:56
So I have a follow up. Trick question. Oh, I’m sorry. I thought it was rhetorical, right?
Russell Lundstrom 21:04
No, no, it’s, you know, the first question I need to answer is, is that revenue? Or is that profit? Right? Then, because they’re dramatically different numbers, and building a business for revenue is pointless. Yeah.
Dean Waye 21:22
All right. So imagine this, I have a pretty good idea. If I’m a CEO, or founder of a relatively small under 50 million or 30 million, I have a relatively good idea if I have hired the right head of sales. Right. And I have a relatively good idea if I’ve hired the right CEO or head of operations or whatever, what’s other than, like, not, other than the question around, like, what are the metrics to judge, like my success in this role as CMO? Like, what’s the red flag, like if this, if you see this, you definitely need to be questioning if you got the right person.
Russell Lundstrom 22:06
You’ve hired a marketer who’s suggesting strategies without having gone into your past sales history. And looked at who are the clients in your business that are driving the profits in your business? At 20, those who are the 20% clients who are driving 80% of the profits, and doing the research on those people, number one, making sure they align with the big picture vision, the CEO, captain of the ship, if they’re sailing to the horizon over here, we need to make sure that the current client base is not heading over here, that’s happened to me in the past. Because we do not want to create a marketing plan that’s going to take us off course. The marketing plan also needs to align with the exit strategy. If you’re telling me you’re building a an enterprise company to sell to a peak investment company versus a legacy lifestyle business loans are completely different marketing plans.
Dean Waye 23:05
So they basically want to apply a model or a template on top of their shoving,
Russell Lundstrom 23:09
if they come in and without talking to you or doing any research. And they’re trying to shove your square business and their round hole. You got the wrong guy.
Dean Waye 23:19
Okay. Yeah, that’s fair enough. All right. Anything else to a nine year old?
Russell Lundstrom 23:28
I think David said it. It’s it’s talk to your clients at the end of the day, whether it’s b2b or b2c. At the end of the day, the only reason anyone buys anything is because they have a problem they’re looking to solve. Big or small. And you if you don’t know what that problem is, you can’t get out there and do any sort of marketing to get people to raise their hand and say, Hey, I got that problem. I need help. That’s really all we’re doing in marketing.
Dean Waye 24:00
All right. This has been great. Okay, so let’s see, Doug.
Doug Hunter 24:06
Yes, sir.
Dean Waye 24:07
This is weird. I have people saying that they’re in the waiting room trying to get in? Don’t know, I don’t know.
Doug Hunter 24:14
So do you. I received an email. Yeah. From you cover medicine topics.
Dean Waye 24:23
So yeah, how we’ve been doing this is I’ve got some topics. And I’m going to list them out for you. And when you when we come across the topic that you want to make sure me that you could explain to a nine year old which is who I am in here. Just let me know. We’ll stop. And then I’m going to be the most rapt audience member you’ve ever had, I promise.
Doug Hunter 24:47
Dean before you before you hit go, I just wanted to I got an email from you recently. I clicked the link to come in and I ended up in a waiting room. So I’ve went out of that and I went into the calendar invite and click that link in there. This link I used to get in. So I think there’s two different links floating out there.
Dean Waye 25:03
Gotcha. Okay. All right. All right. So I’m gonna, I’ll reply to these people then. But I’ll be less wrapped. So problem. All right, yeah. The topics are the people side of marketing. All customers are people. Firstly, the people side of marketing, the marketing team, marketing as the hub of the business, digital and direct marketing. Thanks very much restyling added in the direct marketing by marketing strategy. Campaigns, AI and marketing, measurements and metrics, inbound content marketing, event marketing, Doug, Doug and Dave talked about them. Cmo as linchpin, sales, and marketing as prospecting.
Doug Hunter 25:50
And Dean, so the nine year old like to talk to is the one who’s interested in AI for marketing. Okay,
Dean Waye 25:55
so talk to me and explain to me what a CEO or founder, like the core thing they should absolutely understand about AI and marketing right now. Yeah, so
Doug Hunter 26:04
the core thing about AI marketing right now is, you can do more things better with it if it’s done thoughtfully. And that really gets to both the good and the bad of AI. Now, it’s not to say the bad means you shouldn’t use it. But there’s things that a CEO and a CMO should be aware of, and work to mitigate. So let’s start over on the good side, let’s start happy with this. There’s three main functions that you can use AI marketing, for one would be creating content would be writing and drawing the secondary research or finding an answer. The third is taking some type of action. So in the writing or drawing, you can do something like say, hey, generate a privacy policy. Or you can say adapt it. We’ve all written something. And we say like, you know what, this is the wrong tone. It needs to be more emotional needs to be more conciliatory needs to be more collaborative. You can go into an AI and ask it to change the tone. There’s constant just condensing, there’s some people whose problem isn’t finding the right words, they have too many words. And so you can ask the I like, hey, shortlist down to 50 words, written it down to 500 words. And finally, we’ll be critiquing. So you can write something, you can leave it to the AI and say, critique this, tell me what’s good about it. What’s bad about it. So the first thing is using AI for writing or drawing, it could dramatically speed up the process. The second thing is finding an answer. I love using AI Dean for ideating for brainstorming, it’s like find five topics from my blog on this topic. Or, you know, let’s have a conversation about what we can do with this. Or research asking what is questions? Now, you have to be careful about the model that you’re using. So if models have a training cutoff date, so for example, chat GPT, four, oh, the latest model from open AI, it doesn’t know anything about the world after December 2023. So you can’t ask it about current events. But there’s a lot of questions where you can ask them even things like what is AI? How can I use AI can help you with another thing would be is extraction, pulling data off the web that tells me about something, or taking an action, which would be the third area? So on be summarization, you know, you’ve been on video calls, just like I have where there’s AI note takers on there. There’s no takers can actually make a transcript, summarize it and assign action items or synthesis. Things like hey, score, the sentiment score in the social posts are now with the multimodal models. That means you can load up different types of inputs. You can even load in a screenshot of a graph and see analyze this graph. What does this graph say about my sales, and it can help you and the third thing would be like evaluation. You know, I’m a marketer. I’m not a legal person. So you can upload a contract, for example. And you can say, tell me about the T’s and C’s, what’s good, what’s bad, what should I evaluate? Because we talk about legal, it starts, I think, to drift into talking about the bad or the downsides of AI. And let me tell you a simple story about this. That illustrates a couple different points. So when I did a webinar on using AI for sales and marketing couple of weeks ago, I use one of the big AI tools to generate little pictures of robots to illustrate the different points. So for the good of AI, I said, Please give me a happy robot with a halo and angel wings. And what uh, gave me was four robots. Three were great. Well, they’re all great, but three of the four had the angel wings coming out of the head instead of coming out of the body. And then he said, For the downside of AI, I want a angry robot with glowing red eyes. So it gave me four images. Again, three of the four were good, angry robots. And the fourth one was a picture of Darth Vader. Nice. So in the first case, with the angel wings coming out the head, the AI didn’t understand, you know, what angel wings were and what they could do. And on the second case was clearly a case of IP infringement. So one of the issues or downsides with AI is issue of hallucination. You know, chat GPG 3.5 had a hallucination rate of three point 5% in GPT, for got down to 3%, which means you ask 100 questions is going to lie to you and make up the answer three times just like it put the angel wings on the head. The AIS are calculating what’s the most probable answer. And if it doesn’t know it makes it up, and it doesn’t tell you. Now, there’s ways to mitigate all this. And we’ll talk about that in the middle at the end. And then in the case of Darth Vader that illustrates the issues with IP and copyright liability. So for example, first of all, it may give you content, which is copyrighted by someone else. And you don’t want to get that takedown notice from the legal department. And then secondarily, currently, the Copyright Office won’t let you copyright anything that’s been generated by AI. So that green image that you just created for your campaign, your competitors can take it and they can use up one side down the other and modify it. So another issue would be reputational and business risk. A lot of people like to use AIS for customer service or have chat bots in their website and stuff. But there’s cases out there for example, in California dealership, truck dealership, a Chevy dealership, put a chat bot in their web spot on their website, and the chat bot started selling trucks to for one. And so there’s risks like that. And then there’s just I would say there’s mediocrity, you know, the, the AIS have been trained on everything on the web, all the best of the web and all the worst of the web off of Reddit and Twitter as well, or x. And, you know, I was hitting workshop Dean month, two months ago about the use of AI in HR, and all three recruiters to a woman on the stage said, we can tell when you write your cover letter using AI, because it’s all flat, it all sounds the same. Actually, if you want to get nerdy statistically, there’s words like Delve, and tapestry, that the AI is used much more than real human does. But people can tell when you’re using AI because it doesn’t have that human creativity and human spark.
Dean Waye 31:57
Did you ever? Uh, sorry, I gotta ask you this. Did you ever see that? I think it’s a tick tock video. I think I saw it on YouTube, where someone goes in and they’re This is wasn’t that long ago, like six, seven months. And they’re trying to have I won’t say which GPT or tool. It was okay. But they’re trying to have it write a cold email, in sales. And so it all it starts with I hope this finds you well. So so they’re trying to iterate through this, okay, but do not use the phrase hope this finds you? Well, first thing it says is hope this finds you well. And so they go back because I do not in any way. Use anything about hope you’re okay, hope you’re fine. hope this finds you. Well, hope you’re doing okay. And then write it and write it. Hope this finds you? Well. And for some reason, it just cannot write a cold email that doesn’t help this finds you. Yeah,
Doug Hunter 32:45
absolutely. I haven’t seen that one. But I totally believe it. You know, we talked about some of the problems here. But we should talk about some of the mitigations some of the things you can do to fix it. Yeah, so one is for accuracy. You know, there’s memory and context, which is you can load additional data into the GPU, and you create your query. So that’s it. So in that will provide guidelines for the GP Ts, you can also do what’s called a rag retrieval augmented generation, this is an enterprise level problem, which is basically you trade the A, you train the AI on your own data. So the answer is more accurate, because it’s drawing off of your own database. Things like privacy. Right now, people are loading all sorts of confidential stuff up into these AIs. Well, that becomes part of the training data set, and that may show up in one of your competitors queries. But you can solve that by having your own on premise model. Or even if you can’t afford to have an on premises model. You can use things like incognito mode or deleting history. Now, that assumes that you trust the people building these models. You know, the largest model, for example, is built using CSV is the largest open source models of Allama models that are built by meta in Facebook. Do you trust meta and Facebook to handle your data responsibly? That’s something you need to think about copyright. There are tools out there like Adobe Firefly, where the tool is built completely untrained completely on data, where Adobe has the rights to the images and they will indemnify you. So Darth Vader should not show up. And if Darth Vader does show up, and you get sued, they will cover it for you. And I think the most important thing here, Dean is always to have a human in the loop. You never never should just be directly publishing something out on your social media feed or anything else. If you don’t have someone looking at first, I think I would encourage people to think of AI is a really smart marketing intern. You know, and don’t do anything and don’t publish anything directly that you wouldn’t have a smart marketing intern do without some type of oversight. Now, once you get into the steam, I think there’s a bit of a process that people need to follow. as they go into this, you shouldn’t say I have AI, how can I use it, you shouldn’t start with a solution go looking by problem, you should start with the problem, and then go looking for the solution. And to me, there’s a multi step process for that. You know, the first is just the problem definition, what’s the problem you’re trying to serve, then you need to understand what your boundary conditions are. If you’re in a business where terms like HIPAA, or CCPA, or GDPR means something to you, then you have some type of legal or compliance type of thing that you have to deal with. And that will push you towards different solutions. The other thing is budget. There’s free tools out there, but you get what you pay for. But the good news seen is a lot of these tools are surprisingly affordable. You know, you can get a chat GPT or a call just subscription relatively reasonably Yeah. But those do very, very specific things.
Dean Waye 35:53
As I’m looking at this idea, last point, and then I have a question. Yeah,
Doug Hunter 35:57
well, last point is, you may already have the tools that you need. A lot of people think about things standalone tools like Chad GPT. But a lot of tools, whether it’s mica, Thrace, 365, or Salesforce or Marketo, are starting to implement HubSpot in the tool itself. So what you need you might already have today, so doing what you’re gonna say.
Dean Waye 36:18
So I’m the founder or CEO, let’s say, okay, every cmo that I’m talking about, and I’m interviewing or fractional cmo that I’m talking to her into, yeah, right. Every one of them is spouting some kind of bullshit about AI. Right? What are the red flags that they don’t know what they’re talking about? Or? Or if you want to answer it, the sort of the inverse of that is what’s like the one thing that they should be able to prove to me that they understand about AI in marketing, before I bring them into the company. What’s the green flag?
Doug Hunter 36:53
What’s the green flag? What’s the red flag to me?
Dean Waye 36:58
I don’t want to hire the wrong person. And I don’t want to be baffled by someone’s like dazzling AI bullshit, right? When they don’t really understand what you know the implications?
Doug Hunter 37:06
To me it’s interesting question, because you can you can you can probe them on things like, you ask them questions like, how do you control for hallucinations? How do you control for, you know, privacy? How do you do security, there’s probing questions, you can ask like that, to see what are the downsides. I think like, everyone’s got a really great idea and all the good things you can go do with it. I think a lot of people don’t understand the problems of doing that. And they don’t understand how to control that. So you don’t want someone who’s just like, throw every AI everywhere and let it talk directly to customers and let it post directly to my social media feeds. I think someone who wants to put AI everywhere. So when you have to watch out for this, this is an evolving thing. It is changing marketing, it will continue to change marketing, and the models will get better and better and more reliable. But I think you need to walk into with eyes open and make sure they are not going to blow yourself up giving away trucks to for one or whatever else it is or writing insulting things, you know, or breaking all sorts of speech rules as you go through it. I mean, the green flag is you need to find someone who’s actually used it not someone who has read a whole bunch of blog posts about it look for someone who who has worked it into their workflows, who knows how to use it. And it doesn’t mean that they have to know some great grant tool. It can be as simple as someone who says like, Hey, I’m weak on graphics. So I use it for generating images to create mood boards from my creative team or a user to rewrite individual sentences and the SRA essay that I’m writing myself. It’s not the great Savior, but it will make you a heck of a lot better than what you’re doing. All right. Thank
Dean Waye 38:51
you very much. That was good. Okay, so let’s see. It’s melt ml. I’ve done to make sure I like pick the next person that came in and I want to know if you got a Alright, so now here’s what we’ve been doing. And I’ll I won’t force Whitney to listen to the same thing as well. So you’re up on deck witty? Batter up. Okay, so here’s what we’ve been doing. There’s a list of topics. I just quickly read the list of topics, you pick the one that you’re the expert on, and you treat me like I’m nine years old. And you explain it to me in simple terms, so I understand it. I’m the dummy here, okay. Okay. Okay. So, the list of topics, marketing, versus prospecting cmo as linchpin, event marketing, inbound or content marketing, measurements and metrics, in marketing. Doug just did AI and marketing campaigns, marketing strategy, digital marketing, and actually it’s like digital and didn’t I just have that? Oh, digital direct marketing? Yes, sorry. And Mmm marketing as the hub of the business, the people side of marketing, the marketing team, and the people side of marketing, all customers are people first. A long list, I could
Melanie Asher 40:13
go down a rabbit hole about any of those, can I piggyback off of the AI topic and then go into marketing being the hub of the business? Why not? Okay, so I absolutely love all of the tips that Doug just went through. And when you mentioned the green flag and the red flag, I completely agree that a red flag is whether it’s marketing, whether it’s the CEO, whether it’s anybody else in the business, if the solution is AI, there’s a problem. Because you’re relying too much on something that is generated as a consensus for result, which means it’s going to position you as forgettable. And that’s a big problem. Another area that I maybe I missed, but I didn’t hear Doug talk about very much is the legalities of AI. If you intend to trademark or copyright, anything, you cannot use AI. The initial rulings are requiring that there must be a human component. So looking for something in the contracts that specifically state the protection of IP, and anything that is created with the intent of legally protecting it cannot use IP cannot use AI for. So that’s my two cents with AI. So, back to marketing being the hub of the business. This is like a strong thing for me. I know marketing can often be perceived as the nice to have or will just send it next to the business and they can only focus on lead gen. But the reality is, the more you integrate marketing into all areas of your business, whether it be the prospecting, whether it be the Client Onboarding, or the client experience, the better the marketing you’re going to get, the stronger the brand you’re going to have. The more you get everybody in your team thinking along those lines of Okay. I’ve now had three clients asked me that same question. If I tell marketing, marketing can create an entire campaign an entire series to help us better communicate and get the message out. So it becomes an easier Yes. My whole approach in working with any of my clients is make it easy for them to do business with you. The easier it is for them to say yes, the faster they’ll say yes. Excuse me.
Dean Waye 43:00
What’s the what’s on your glass?
Melanie Asher 43:01
So this is actually an old I think it’s a McDonald’s class. It’s like, original, of like some Disney characters. So it says random fun facts that most people don’t know like, Mickey sorcerer hat at Disney Studios is 122 feet tall. Dobies, the only dwarf without without a beard. Kiss me were the only words ever spoken by Pluto. And Donald’s middle name is
Dean Waye 43:34
fontal Roy, that I knew.
Melanie Asher 43:37
So it’s just a fun little thing that has survived all these years.
Dean Waye 43:42
So I’m a founder and CEO and I’m hiring my first ever CMO or my first ever fractional CMO. Right? And this person is saying that marketing should be the hub of the business. Like what are the two main compelling reasons that you’re gonna give me then
Melanie Asher 44:01
the main compelling reasons is different aspects of your business. So client experience, sales and executive all have different perspectives. And it is marketing’s job to take those different perspectives and put them together into a single strategy into a single approach that helps those different departments or those different perspectives accomplish their goals. There are so for example, if a company is dealing with investors, there’s usually some type of goal that they have to accomplish or some version of accountability that may or may not be directly related to marketing. There could also be a longer term goal typically it’s to sell the company. There are seeds that you can plant in your marketing today that will help you accomplish a future goal. And the more marketing is brought in to the conversation and planning, the more successful you’re going to be both short term and long term. And the more you’re going to build a brand that people want to be a part
Dean Waye 45:12
of knowing how to brand. What if I sell widgets? That is a great question. And I’m not a consumer company.
Melanie Asher 45:22
I would say the answer to that is still yes, having a brand is still about is still a value enhancer. And the reason for that is even if you have a widget, are you selling based on price? Or you want them to just click Buy on? Anybody that markets to them? If you’re looking to generate consistent repeat business, then yes, you need a brand.
Dean Waye 45:50
Okay. All right, that’s good. Okay, what else? I mean, do I? What if like, we have a very strong, we’re, we don’t think of ourselves as a marketing organization, we think of ourselves as a sales organization. Right? We do product lead growth. Yep. Right. So it’s really like operations and Dev and sales and marketing. I mean, you know, so far, in the two years that we’ve been in business, you know, marketing is a nice to have are an afterthought. And your point about why going forward, that’s not the right approach is what
Melanie Asher 46:29
the point to that is, it makes it easier for a client to say no to you, it makes it easier for them to entertain your competition, and entertain switching over to them, because you’ve provided no memorable value. Everybody knows this, everybody says this. But magically, everybody forgets this when it comes to actually more when marketing is we’re all busy. Everybody is busy. And the second that you have the expectation that your target audience, that your prospective clients, or that your clients are going to instantly remember you and instantly think of you is the second you’ve set yourself up for failure. Yeah.
Dean Waye 47:16
What I tell people, and I just had the same conversation again, this week with a big global enterprise software company that I’m writing email outreach for, for their BDRs. And, obviously, I’m not talking to any of the BDRs. Right, I’m talking to the marketing heads. And I said like, the biggest sort of the trap we all fall into, like the curse of this is that you’re trying to get me to write something that you yourself would never open and read. Right? You think that the stuff that’s in your inbox that someone sent to you, it you don’t owe those people even one second of your time, it’s instant delete, it’s whatever, right? And yet, right? You think that your audience is going to behave differently than you behave when you’re the audience of someone else? Right? You do not open an email, and see if it’s a first time cold email and book a call with a sales guy. It’s never happened, right? You don’t watch a 45 minute software demo video. Nope. And yet you expect other people like who are these other people, they’re just employees at a company just like you, they have the same problems that you do. And so like the curse of it all is first. Now here’s the thing, we kind of have to think that way. Otherwise, nothing would ever get created in the first place. Right? No one would ever, no one would ever create a webinar, if they didn’t believe that what they’re delivering is valuable. And people should read it or register and watch, right? And on the flip side, you have to understand that nobody wants to register and watch because you want them to or because of what you’re going to say they only care about what it’s going to do for them. So yeah, it’s so tricky, right? You have to you have to have the confidence and arrogance to want to like, talk and write to people. And at the same time, you can’t be confident or arrogant because they’re just like you crazy.
Melanie Asher 49:10
So the feature feature benefit vomit versus providing actual value.
Dean Waye 49:17
All right. All right. Wrap it up for me anything else you want to say as a I’m a founder who’s also nine years old? And
Melanie Asher 49:24
also nine years old is in there isn’t a regular day so I know how to tailor this regular
Dean Waye 49:36
day. Okay. I require everyone to boil it down for me. I you know, I found it a very complicated company and yet I require everyone to talk to me like I’m nine.
Melanie Asher 49:48
There you go. A your cmo fractional full time, whatever direction you go in. Shouldn’t be your right hand man right hands Women, your best friend, because they are going to find a way to make the impact on your market and on your business that no one else in the company.
Dean Waye 50:13
If you hire the right one, if you hire the right one. Okay. Whitney, who also is a big believer, you might be on mute Whitney.
Whitney Hahn 50:28
Got it. Thanks. Also
Dean Waye 50:30
a big believer in marketing as the hub of the business, but I’m not gonna pin you in and redo the list again,
Whitney Hahn 50:36
I know. It’s cool. You don’t have to read me the list. I take note. The only thing I would add to what Melanie has already shared with you about marketing is the hub. And in answer to your nine year old question there that you post at the end is to think about marketing. Like what you say about yourself, and your brand is what is said about you and you’re not in the room. So when you were asking, do I still need a brand? If I don’t do this, or I don’t do that? Yeah. Yeah.
Dean Waye 51:10
Think of it that way. Which topic do you want to tackle?
Whitney Hahn 51:14
I think the what Melanie set us up for really well was marketing for prospecting. Because it’s my opinion that marketing makes the promises sales and operations have to deliver on, right. So if you’re doing it well, marketing and sales together, I work with a lot of small businesses, 5 million or so and under. And they need to hear it as sales enablement. I think we are well past the days where sales was siloed in one spot, and marketing was siloed in the other spot, and they were each pulling out their own yokes, and the CEO assumed they were pulling into the right direction. And I think we’ve all seen that go not so great way too many times. So understanding that marketing is for prospecting. It is part of early sales enablement, I think is super helpful.
Dean Waye 52:09
Okay, actually, we have never talked about sales enablement. It’s not even in the topic list, except for marketing as prospecting. But I used to work. In fact, I’ve done a lot of work in sales enablement? Well, generally, what you find is sales enablement. In about, what about 40% of the time, it’s owned by sales, and about 40% of the time it’s owned by marketing, and maybe 20% of time it’s owned by l&d, or the learning and development. They think of it as a training thing, right. So this, let me like frame this up for a second, in case someone’s not familiar with sales in a way, because it’s a relatively new concept, but really only came around like 1518 years ago, on the west coast, and it’s sort of moved its way across the US. And then further on around the world. Sales Enablement, organizations tend to have three levels of maturity. So the first level, and the most important thing is, it’s all about making sure that new salespeople are on boarded properly, so that they’re as productive as possible as early as possible. Usually, the next stage of maturity is making sure that all of sales, you know, even people will never are all brought up to at the same level of product knowledge, right? Especially in organizations or tech organizations where there’s always iterations, right? If you’re making the exact same product, with no changes in the last seven years, this is less important. But if you’re in any kind of like tech or fast moving organ industry, like you’re always adding features, or whatever. And then the third stage, which is when I would usually be running is when Okay, so we’ve got they know what what we do they know what we have, we know what we saw. And now what should they be saying to the, to new prospects, or to the people that they’re in that little room with, you know, the little conference room with eight chairs, right? And, and so I’d be brought in to like, figure out what a person is going to say to a person in that room. And like, actually, like create and write it for them and then teach them like how to say it and stuff. And I that sales enablement was fascinating. It was one of the most fascinating fields I’ve ever worked in. I was the I was basically I was the I don’t even know what the title was anymore I worked in, I was one of like, only two, I think people who worked in sales enablement for a global software company for a while, a lot of fun. Sales Enablement is an interesting field. And I
Whitney Hahn 54:28
think when marketing is done properly, it is now in in today’s modern, faster decision environment where prospects are doing more and more of the research on their own before you’re ever even aware that they’re interested in your solution, right marketing is sales enablement. It is part of that third tier you were describing most.
Dean Waye 54:49
When I was on the sales side, I wasn’t even in sales anymore. I was in sales, right? Every year more and more of the salespeople are an actual salesperson is Brian and further and deeper into the customers buyer journey. Right, they do more and more of their own research and the web and the company’s like marketing materials and stuff before they ever contact a salesperson or let a salesperson get a conversation initiated. So marketing, marketing encroaches or I don’t see marketing and crutches, customers are forcing marketing to do more of the lift. And get on drawing someone into the company’s world, before an actual human salesperson is ever engaged. Just put it that way.
Whitney Hahn 55:33
I would agree with that. I’m
Dean Waye 55:34
not saying it’s good. I’m just saying that reality, right? We can’t
Whitney Hahn 55:38
change it. So how do we embrace that and move along with it? And marketing as a prospecting tool? Is, is I think the right way to think about it. It’s everything that you’re saying about yourself everything that you’re doing for brand building, what is your prospect saying about you, when you’re not there? How do they feel about you when you’re not right in front of them? And how are you taking them from strangers as you so eloquently, and I think correctly put it, Dean, to people who know you and trust you enough to have a conversation with you, you know, we are our inboxes are just so noisy. And our social media is just so noisy, that we are getting more and more protective of our good email, not the junk email, not the Yahoo address that we check like quarterly. But the good email address that as a business to consumer business to business marketer, we really want. So we have to take our, our responsibility as marketers to that prospect seriously, and not try to be everything to everybody but be a really specific solution to a really specific set of prospects with a very specific problem.
Dean Waye 56:49
There’s hardly anyone at work now who where they go to their inbox is not just delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. Oh, yeah, that might be interesting. I won’t kill that just yet. Delete, delete, delete. We don’t check our inboxes. We don’t check email anymore. We delete email. Yeah, no. Okay. So I’m a nine year old founder. And I’m trying to hire my first ever CMO of any stripe, or certainly my first ever fractional CMO. All right, so how are you guys going to make things better and easier for sales? So that we can start booking revenue? What’s the answer to that? What what red flag or green flag answers should I be keeping an eye on from the candidate who’s trying to get this job?
Whitney Hahn 57:35
You should be listening for all the classic stuff, and awareness of your target audience. And the key problem they solve I like to think of it as the bullseye. What’s the problem you’ve solved? And who do you solve that for? And when you can identify that and your ideal client profile, your target audience you know and know what you want to be known for, then you can go out with the right bait to get the right fish. All right now when we go when we go fishing, we don’t have to like the bait the fish too. And I think marketing too often is built for us. It’s built for the CEOs ego, or
Dean Waye 58:10
my dad used to say that all the time. You don’t ask a fish out a fish you ask a fisherman.
Whitney Hahn 58:19
Same thing. Your dad was a smart guy. Was he a marketer as well.
Dean Waye 58:23
He wasn’t a marketer, but he always thought he was a smart guy.
Melanie Asher 58:28
There’s stories there
Doug Hunter 58:29
are so many stories.
Dean Waye 58:35
All right. Okay, so hold on. I’m gonna turn Doug was typing. I mean, sorry, David was typing kind of loud. So I muted him for a second. Typing there is nothing wrong with typing I just. Okay, so at this point, everyone’s gone over one topic. And I want to see if anyone wants a second swing. And I’m perfectly okay with just short comments on this. Someone wants to make a particular point instead of doing, you know, the whole thing for me. But we didn’t do really much of anything about Inbound or content marketing. Somehow that escaped. No one talked about measurements or like planning and executing campaigns. We didn’t do anything about digital or direct marketing. I mean, technically, I mean, digital, not in the sense of content marketing, but Google ads, Facebook, about that kind of stuff. And then no one. I mean, in a way, Whitney, by talking about marketing as prospecting. We also sort of talked about the people side of marketing, right? All customers are people first. That really is the first thing everyone seems to forget is that your audience is pretty much in the aggregate individually where you can be unique, but in the aggregate are all pretty similar. And so pretending that or thinking that you’re going to do something and the people that you’re talking to are going to behave differently than you behave in that situation is probably not going to be true, then anything about content, I can’t believe nobody wants to tackle content marketing.
Melanie Asher 1:00:09
Oh, I’ll jump in on content marketing, alright. What is really valuable and has potential to be valuable with content marketing, when done correctly, is it allows the business to going back to marketing being the hub, be the language of how your customers and your prospects think and know about your business, not how you describe your business.
Dean Waye 1:00:39
Say that again.
Melanie Asher 1:00:41
So when you talk to a founder or a CEO, they will describe their business, their industry in their buzz terms, with the assumption that everybody on the planet knows exactly what they’re talking about. When in reality, nobody uses those terms. And that’s why they’re coming to you. And that’s where content marketing has the potential when done correctly, to be a powerhouse to bridge that gap between what the company knows and as an expert in versus what the prospect does not know. But yet knows they need a solution for
Dean Waye 1:01:28
that has already gone searching right there to learn.
Melanie Asher 1:01:32
Yes. And so it becomes that bridge that can help them take steps closer. And if you are able to provide that information to them in a way that they can receive it, whether it be video shorts, long webinars, whether it be blog posts, whether it you know, whatever the distribution method is, if you’re able to do that, you become the go to resource when they learn something new, but they don’t know what it means. All right.
Dean Waye 1:02:11
That’s pretty good. I’ve never, I’ve never heard it framed that way. Thank you. Well done. I
Melanie Asher 1:02:18
thought they were doing some massive head shakes in either direction. So I’d like to hear his take on this. Yeah,
Dean Waye 1:02:24
let’s go. First need to know about
David Poulos 1:02:29
content marketing, you’re exactly right. If you’re the person they’ve come to realize is the bridging expert, you understand the jargon side, but you can explain it in a way that for some reason the company cannot, then you’re going to be the go to when they need help. There’s no question about that you’re setting the stage for you to be the expert that can explain whatever the company is selling to them, and they’re going to come to you first. Always good stuff. Now the question is, why can’t the company articulate their own value prop in a way that’s accessible to normal humans? And the answer is often because they don’t know their customers very well. They’re preaching to themselves, they think they’re part of their own target audience, and they’re not. So unless you’re selling tech to techies, you’re not getting that.
Melanie Asher 1:03:14
So another in another potential answer in is ego.
David Poulos 1:03:20
That’s suddenly like everything. That’s why we’re marketers. But if you think that spewing a whole bunch of jargon about your product, and its suppose it benefits is going to make anybody buy anything, I have news. But here’s the thing, if you can explain it to someone like Dean who’s a nine year old, then you’re really going to have something in front of you, because that’s what people used to. But that level of intellect is all they need to rationalize the emotional trigger you’ve already set up to make the purchase, if you’re doing it, right. So there’s no question that if you’re able to use content to translate the tricky stuff into the real stuff, that’s gonna draw like flies to honey. It’s unbelievable if you do it, right. Yeah,
Dean Waye 1:04:08
I’ve got a I’ve got a slide that I sometimes show during my presentations. And it says, The fastest way to murder persuasion is to think they buy if only they knew everything. Right, nobody’s gonna stick around for everything, man. Figure out what they’re interested in. Hey, Adrian, can you hear us? Maybe not. All right, so much.
Russell Lundstrom 1:04:43
chime in on the content.
Dean Waye 1:04:45
And then mind, sorry, but once you’ve trimmed down that kind of base, you talked about direct marketing, and I definitely want to include that. So just roll right into it after that, if you don’t mind.
Russell Lundstrom 1:04:59
So even No, I’m wearing his hat. You know, Hormoz. He’s the biggest dude out there right now on marketing, and he loves content marketing. But you have to further refine, what do you mean by content marketing? Is it email content? Is it social media content? Is it blog content for SEO? What content specifically, and remember, when we were talking about the role of a CMO is to marshal and guard the company resources. If you’re dealing with a small business and say they maybe only have about 5k a month, they can invest in their marketing. And they have a pretty short runway of cashflow. You know, they need revenue today, tomorrow, the next day. The problem with the content game is it’s a long game, especially SEO social media. And if you’re, if I’m the owner of business, and I have five grand to spend, and I’m gonna give you three months, you cannot produce enough content to move the needle to give me the leads to make the revenue to keep my job. And the problem is also you wrap it in the AI now and you’ve got every marketer and their brother out there creating a billion in one blog posts, that Google now has to search through making automated, you know, YouTube shorts and all this other stuff. We have a content nightmare going on. And so where I disagree with Hormoz, is, you can’t and this actually does roll right into direct marketing. Content, the content game is not for startups or companies with really limited budgets. It just there’s no ROI on it. And yes, it’s good for branding. And yes, it’s good for answering questions and all that. But what that leads to is your customer sophistication. And are you? Are you attracting customers that have to make 20 3040 decisions before they actually buy your product? Or are you marketing to that smaller group of people who are ready to write a check today, you’ve identified they have this problem, and it’s burning so bright brightly in their lives, that if you just show them the right message, at the right time in the right place, that’s the master marketing equation. They will write you a check today. And so this is where it comes down to that’s the conversion, you know, how close are you to the conversion event in your marketing and content marketing is almost typically always at the far end of that spectrum, where this person, oh, hey, here’s a blog post on XYZ, yeah, I’m kind of interested in that. And then I gotta go read another blog post and another blog post and another blog posts. And it’s six months before I even realized what product you’re selling, right? And so when when you’re dealing with a smart or a small business that has limited resources, as a CMO, you have to be able to correctly identify who is the right person you’re trying to target? What is the message they need to hear in order to write a check today, and buy today? And where did they go to solve that problem? That’s your channels. And you should minimize that down to the to the most efficient process as possible. And I like my favorite suggestion is, when working with the CEO is have give them a long form VSL framework, like you know, yeah, how to write a long form sales letter, you know, or Bronson’s, perfect webinar? Can they even do that? Can they explain their own business to someone in plain language? And then the cheapest thing to do is you need to be Do you know your right person? Can you generate a list? Can you create your dream 100 list? To have them write the letter, create the list, dream 100, go to the post office, mail it off, if you mail off 100 letters of stamps, what 50 cents, right? So you’re gonna you’re spending a weekend writing the letter and maybe 50 100 bucks and postage and mail. And if you can’t write a letter that gets at least two or three of those people out of 100 to pick up the phone and call you. You don’t have the right market to message match.
Dean Waye 1:09:19
I would I go somewhere. I come across clients and like they’re brand new, or they’re just starting out or they’re still really small. And they’re saying Yeah, so like, I’ve got this, my, what I want to do for these folks or what I make what I want to make and then so it’s for these people and like those people don’t even know that they have a problem in their stages, right? There’s this famous five stage, you don’t know you have a problem. You know, you have a problem that you don’t even think about the fact that someone might have solved it. Right? You think people might have solved it, but you don’t know who you would buy it from our you know that there are people that are vendors and sell solutions to this. And the final stage is like okay, what are the details and how do I buy this What are the specs, right. And I tell people like, you’re like way over in level one, as you’re a small business, you cannot educate a market into existence. You can’t write enough blog posts and even make enough ads. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s that you’re a small business, you will never have the resources, time or money or people to educate enough people put in enough, you know, effort and get enough people interested and will like, sit still. So that you can educate a market into it needs to already exist, you need to be talking to people who at least know that they have a problem and know that someone solves it, and you’re one of those people, but man, like every month or two, someone comes to me and says, Hey, Dean, like, I need like, you know, I need the outbound marketing created. Cuz this is what we do. And I’m gonna ask like, you do not want out? I mean, I don’t, I can’t even take your money for this, because it will ultimately fail. You do not? You don’t have enough money to be well enough to you can’t even tell me you can’t go to LinkedIn and do a search for who would buy it right? You can’t even like narrow it down that much. So like don’t
Russell Lundstrom 1:11:09
you can’t Yeah, you can’t make a list you got enough. Yeah. And the best place this also ties into your your sales, focused marketing. You know, the sales team of an organization is a critical component to the success of marketing. You should be recording every single sales call have it transcribed. This is where you throw it into AI, it’s made for this, have that phone call transcribed and analyzed by a large language model? And say, Hey, what are the top three problems, this person talked about? What are the top three desires. So there you have both sides of the same coin, the problems and the desires. Now, if your salesperson is doing a good job of discovery, those will become really clear. And over the course of 1015 2030 phone calls. You now have and you can add 20? What are the three problems that the majority of our best customers have, you can actually tie it actually into buyers? All right, who actually bought and what did they say their problems were? And can we get a mass on that. And then now that is my marketing messaging, right? Here’s the problems, here’s the desires. And now you got AI that can pick it all out for you. And now you got a guy that can write specifically to those problems to those desires. And now you can start the testing process where you’re marketing brings in those exact people,
Dean Waye 1:12:31
I’m going to be, I don’t normally like to do this, but I am going to give myself a little pat on the back here. And a hard choice, right, and just accepting reality. I’m like three years, I recently like finished my third year of being on my own with my own company, okay. And I deliberately did not do content creation as marketing, even though like, I’m a copywriter, like I write maybe a million words a year, like I’m writing all the time for all kinds of people. I didn’t do content writing because it was year one and year two, and year three, especially year one and year two, which were COVID years, right, hardcore code years, when I started, like pre vaccine. And so like, it’s not that I don’t believe in the value of it is that it is a long play. Now, granted, I knew that I would reach a point around year three, where I said, Man, I really wish I had like, you know, been blogging and doing all that stuff for the last two plus years. Right? Because then like it would have had enough momentum and but I didn’t have the bandwidth for that. So I went into sales and prospecting mode. I did direct marketing, as opposed to content marketing, I knew I would regret not having that body of content, like generating some agenda. And on the other hand, I knew that there’s no point in regretting it. I don’t have the runway for that yet. And so now, you’ve we’ve talked about and you’ve talked about who shouldn’t be doing content, like marketing as their strategy, because it’s not right for them or it’s not right for them yet. Right. Who should be or shouldn’t be doing direct marketing. See how I gracefully segwayed over to the other topic you mentioned at the top?
Russell Lundstrom 1:14:19
I’m that good? Yeah. Well, you know, in my opinion, again, it comes down to the best and highest use of resources and for any business that doesn’t have
Dean Waye 1:14:31
wait, I’m sorry, we should stop. Let everyone know what direct marketing is for this part of our conversation. As opposed to content marketing or advertising or
Russell Lundstrom 1:14:42
I would define direct marketing is any sort of marketing activity that you are trying to promote some sort of activity, whether it’s a click a buy, an engagement, whatever, that is measurable, and you can actually calculate an ROI Lie on it. And under
Dean Waye 1:15:01
that Deathrun digital marketing is a subset of direct marketing. Sure,
Russell Lundstrom 1:15:05
it can be an email. I mean, it can be an email, it can be a Google ad, a Facebook ad, it can be a postcard. I mean, I’m old enough. I remember I wrote
Dean Waye 1:15:15
those last year fax machine, broadband provider, and Arizona and California, like they still do like postcards and mail. I’ve heard mania almost never gets to work on physical anymore. Right. And so I was so happy to be doing like traditional marketing is great.
Russell Lundstrom 1:15:33
Well, back in the day, you know, before the internet, if you’re going to this is why I love all the old schools, you know, cables and shorts and all those guys. Because if you’re going to, if you’re going to invest 100 grand in a direct mail campaign, you better bet your butt that you’ve done your research, you know who your customer is, you know what their problems are, you’ve tested your copy. And you don’t drop 100 grand on a direct mail piece that isn’t trackable, and you just don’t gamble like that. And in today’s world, Facebook has made it you can the the most novice of marketing, knuckleheads can go in and run an ad in 15 minutes with no experience and no research. And that’s that’s where we’ve come into problems.
Dean Waye 1:16:17
I once showed someone how specific Facebook ads could be where I wrote an ad where own and I pushed an ad on Facebook, where only my wife would see it out among humans on Earth. I said, that’s how you can go down to one person I said,
Russell Lundstrom 1:16:31
that’s how we found our house in the neighborhood we want to live in. So we ran out to the zip code and specifically to older people who were thinking they needed to fix up their house before they sold it. And I put a cute picture of our family looking really sad. Please sell us your house.
Dean Waye 1:16:51
So it was pretty cool. I mean, you talked about a founder who like doesn’t even have money or really the timeline. It’s not that it’s the money. But you know what the timeline for kicking off content marketing and waiting for it to kick in. So you said like, you know, write a sales letter. I mean, you were being somewhat facetious. But write a letter and mail it by, you know, by snail mail. You weren’t being facetious. You actually met right? Oh, man.
David Poulos 1:17:15
No, that’s 100. That’s really cheap. It’s a solid test,
Dean Waye 1:17:19
but I mean, 100%. But
Russell Lundstrom 1:17:23
what’s his name’s Hugh? Is it Eugene Eduardo, who wrote the 16 word sales letter at Albuquerque. Pardo? Yeah. A Volvo. working right, a darn sales letter. Okay,
Dean Waye 1:17:35
so me, but the point was, whether it’s physicians or not, and I believe that because you know, I would do it, I would, I’ve done everything you can think of. But that’s something that someone with like, virtually no resources could do. Which means you think direct marketing comes way, way, way earlier in the timeline for a lot or most companies than content marketing, necessarily.
Russell Lundstrom 1:17:56
Because that’s also where you test your messaging. So, you know, back in the day, we hired at the time he still works today, I’m not going to name him, but we hired a Facebook guru, right? Because scaling on Facebook was the Holy Grail. And is this was when I, we, my sister, and I started a software or a supplement business. And, you know, we we went to him, and we’re like, yeah, go scale. And we had a webinar funnel built out. He spent $50,000, driving traffic to the website before he came back to us two months later and said, your funnel sucks. And I was like, you couldn’t stop at 1000 or 2000, or 3000, or 10, or 20? Or 30, you had to spend 50. Grand, right? Because he got paid on adspend. Yeah. And that’s a big problem where you need to know and this goes into the KPIs and metrics, if you’re testing your messaging. What are the KPIs that tells you if your ad is a winner or loser? I forget who said it, but you know, are you fishing in the right pond with the right bait? Yeah. Can I can I do rapid testing?
Melanie Asher 1:19:05
Your question Dean, where you said who should and should not be doing content marketing?
Dean Waye 1:19:10
The very beginning? Yeah, yeah. So I think that’s a great
Melanie Asher 1:19:13
question. And to add to everything that Russell’s saying is, I love the I love the texture messaging with direct marketing. And to go back to answering your question, the more complex your sale is, the more you need a content or what strategy because you’re going to the the more complex your sale is, the more touchpoints and interaction you’re going to have with a prospective client to get them to Yes, and if you can always prove and always answer their question, you’re building trust along the way. And as much as we like to think that sales and getting to yes is a science or a data driven approach to getting there It’s about the emotional reassurance to getting them to feel like okay, you’ve answered every question I’ve had. And you’ve been able to provide backup proof to validate everything you’ve said, I can trust you, I know you will provide and deliver as promised. So
Dean Waye 1:20:19
in the Dean Waye world, what you’ve just described are the two safety questions. And the difference between the definition of b2c and b2b, right? Or in the D way world, b2b. Or b2c rather means that you’re persuading a person and that person can make the purchase decision. They might be the owner of the company. They might be a consumer, it doesn’t matter. It’s still a b2c sale, or persuasion. Well, yeah, right. And then b2b is someone has to buy in from someone else before they can do it. And so the two safety questions for all b2c including or simple sales? Is? How do I know I won’t regret this purchase? And in b2b, it’s, how do I know it’s safe for me to vouch for you to my boss? And b2b, it seems that’s a longer sales cycle, like content management, content marketing to do quite well there. Right? Because that person, their boss said, Okay, we’ve got this problem, go research a bunch of companies and find me three that we might want to meet with, right, and you want to be in the top three, obviously, and anyone who doesn’t seem like a safe choice, because it doesn’t matter how much if I’m the employee, and I need to pass you off to my manager, at some point for a meeting, it doesn’t matter how much money you’re going to make my company, or save my company, my employer, if there’s a chance that you’re going to embarrass me, and I’m gonna get fired and lose 100% of my income, you’re not getting in the door. Right? Right. I need to know you’re safe. Whereas if I’m the one making a decision, and I have a problem, and I feel it acutely, then, like, for me, those are the people that I go after for direct marketing. You know, if we’re going to generalize, right, how do I know I won’t regret this? That’s the safety question. That’s the hurdle. I need to clear that. Clearing the safety question. hurdle doesn’t get you the sale, but not clearing, it absolutely kills your chance of the sale,
Melanie Asher 1:22:13
exactly.
Dean Waye 1:22:18
Who should still be doing physical mail, direct everybody?
Whitney Hahn 1:22:21
What? We just talked about noise in your box and noise on your social media feeds. And Facebook decides they want to change the algorithm for this and X decides they want to do that. And even what you’re spending on digital ads doesn’t necessarily get to the people that you want it to get to. The only thing you can control is your list and addresses your email list build that physical addresses build that, especially with hyperfocused personalized messaging. Yeah, that long format, sales letter or short format sales letter or the postcard with an actual dang handwritten address on it as the first thing I’m opening?
David Poulos 1:23:03
Yes, where there isn’t any noise mailbox. It’s freaking empty. There’s nothing in it on a daily basis. Your competition has been cut by nine tenths in the last five years, because isn’t there
Dean Waye 1:23:15
a danger? You’re going to be thought of as old fashion?
David Poulos 1:23:17
Who cares? Do you buy from old fashioned things? Like flour? Do you buy sugar? Yeah, you got to have these things. If you’re a purveyor of something somebody’s got to have, they’re gonna buy. It doesn’t matter whether you’re old fashioned fashion, whatever.
Melanie Asher 1:23:32
If you’re somewhere that your competition is not you have more chances of getting that sale?
David Poulos 1:23:37
Yeah, blue ocean theory? Absolutely. Yeah,
Dean Waye 1:23:40
I was about to say, it wasn’t this week, it was last week for another email client, right now I’m writing like a sequence for them. And we’re going through it and they’re talking about, like, you know, we’re going to do push ads landing page. This is all fantastic. You know, and, you know, over time, we’ve done all that stuff. As an email is very different than a lot of those channels in that it is essentially until you get the physical right, but they don’t do any physical email is essentially the only marketing channel where the target off if you do it, right, delude themselves into thinking that it is a personal experience between you and them, that you might be the only person reading. They don’t ever think I might be the only person reading this. But they just like they can like get into a flow with it, that they’re never going to do on an ad or landing page.
David Poulos 1:24:27
And if it’s not written that way, it’s not going to succeed. Yeah, they want
Dean Waye 1:24:31
it right it like all the stuff that they delete. This is the other argument every week, same argument. If I didn’t love email so much, you know, I would stop writing them because everyone wants the same generic stuff that’s instantly, you know, vaporize. I’ve got email sequences now. Where like five email sequences, two or three of those have open rates higher than 100%. It’s rare, but I’ve got them up damn sure I made those screenshots, right. Keep that for. I mean, the flip side of that is I can literally never tell a client, hey, look at this example of where I exceeded even 100%. So it wasn’t a lot. It was like 103% 101%. Right. But I mean, ultimately, it’s part of that is inflation from like, you know, email servers opening, opening the emails to see if there’s any click or whatever. And part of it is people forwarding on the emails. So you can get a higher open rate than technically of the number of people you’ve sent. Of course, I can never show anyone that because the first thing everyone, any clients can says, well, I’ll have some of that, please. Thank you. And what what I didn’t get 103% on your, you know, your b2b SaaS widget? Seems like Yeah, I think you did a very good job, Dean. I frankly. So yeah, I don’t show those off. But like, I keep them I look at them once in a while, like, some occasionally, occasionally, kind of rocket this. But otherwise, I don’t look at it very often. Nobody should look at their trophy wall too much. You can, you’ll, you’ll start believing your own PR, as they say, right. Okay, does anyone have anything that they want to talk to me about? About either all customers are people first? Or what do we do with these people in the company where you’re brought in as a CMO or fractional CMO, and there’s already marketers in the company?
Whitney Hahn 1:26:24
team alignment?
Dean Waye 1:26:25
Well, I’m talking about, like the actual people on the team, here’s that here’s an example. Imagine that you’ve been brought in or a client wants to bring you in, and they already have like, junior or mid people, right? mid level, folks. You know, there’s someone who had handled social media for them. And there’s someone who like writes for the website or writes the blog or whatever, right? Like, what are some of like, the indicators that the people that are working there or like one of the people who works there in marketing should not be here? No matter what, nobody wants to talk about axing, you
Whitney Hahn 1:26:59
know, we’re given we’re given thoughtful consideration. Wait a minute,
Dean Waye 1:27:04
you got like, You got X number of people in, you know, who are marketers in that company? What’s like a red flag that like this person should not be other than the obvious red flag is like, their dad is the manager of something at that company.
Russell Lundstrom 1:27:17
You know, metrics and pace. Yellow stuff. Okay. Like, we have a young lady who’s learning how to grow your organic YouTube channel. And part of that is thumbnails. And it took her four days to create 10 thumbnails. That’s not good pace.
David Poulos 1:27:41
That’s very thoughtful. Yeah. Yeah.
Melanie Asher 1:27:47
I had a client that had some ridiculous goal of, I think it was four Instagram posts per day, however, it took them eight hours to create, edit and approve a single post. I’m like, Really, let’s go back to the first question of why our goal is for Instagram posts a day, right? And see if that’s even the right thing we should be focusing on. And then we’re going to address the operational issues of why it takes eight hours. Yeah, something that has the lifespan of two seconds I
Dean Waye 1:28:27
was on, if you do the math on
David Poulos 1:28:28
that, you’d have to be three years ahead of the curve in order to break even Yeah.
Dean Waye 1:28:33
32 hours to make 24 hours worth the content formula. I was on a call once where someone, I don’t know how this person got hired. But there were a deacon up on this call will work and do some issues on our marketing side. And I said, one of the reasons that my clients have to pay me upfront, is that I found that once I get paid up front, I mean, I work in like projects, small projects and sprints. So no one’s in the need for like 10s of 1000s at a time, like, you know, just a couple of guys. But the number of times I’m invited to a meeting plummeted. And like, once, once, I’d already had the money. And so there was no chance that I was just going to like, not charge them for it. And I but we’re on this call. And there were I don’t know how this person ever got hired, they must have been somebody’s kid. And so we need you to like take a screenshot, and then like and send it to somebody. All right, I’m gonna I’ll figure it out. I’m on it. I’m gonna figure out how to make a screenshot. I’m gonna like send it and I was like, I asked like, hey, just so I’m clear. Like, what’s involved in learning how to make a screenshot? How long is that going to take? You said I’ll definitely have that. I think it’s only going to take me like a day or two. Oh my word. Not to make the screenshot a day or two to learn how to make the screenshot were there. The person who was in his 40s Okay, I’ve literally I’m never going to forget this story, I will tell this story many times. So yeah, sometimes sometimes you get that’s a red flag on someone, right? Like, what what should be a table stakes for a marketer takes a very, very long time to accomplish. And basically all of your stories are pretty close to that, too.
2 Please Explain Marketing to Dean
Thu, Jul 04, 2024 12:44PM • 59:50
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
cmo, marketing, customer, ai, content marketing, content, people, sales, product, nps, ceo, talking, linchpin, business, put, topic, explain, kpis, market, question
SPEAKERS
Ilan Vagenshtein, Tom Kuhr, Marc Fuentes, Yasmine de Aranda, Casey Powers, Sarah Falcon, Dean Waye
Dean Waye 00:00
Okay, so here’s the crazy, silly, dumb, weird concept for these live streams, okay? You’re gonna pick a topic that you’re an expert in, in what on this thing that’s on the list that’s on the screen. And you’re gonna explain it to me, like I’m nine. Which means you’re going to explain the most important thing, and you’re going to boil it down, so a nine year old would understand it. So I’m the dummy on the inexperienced one here, and you get to pick a topic, and you get to crystallize it for me. Does anybody have any questions? About my silly little concept? For the silly little livestream? Or, if there are no questions? Does anyone want to volunteer to pick a topic and go first?
Casey Powers 00:59
I’d like to talk about AI. If nobody else wants to just in a very pragmatic let me know, go ahead.
Dean Waye 01:07
Nine years old, and but I’m keenly interested in marketing, apparently, as a nine year old. And so I’m wondering about the sort of the future and the present and AI in marketing. So like, what’s the core thing I need to really understand to understand everything else, so to speak, Casey, about AI and marketing? Yeah,
Casey Powers 01:30
so AI is here, right? There’s no more guessing about it’s going to be part of your life, Mr. Nine year old as you’re growing up, the good news is, is that, you know, there’s there’s a saying that goes with it, AI isn’t going to take your job, but somebody who knows AI or knows how to use AI may take your job. So let’s get to what AI is KU is, it’s going to allow you to get through some a lot of the tasks that will take a lot of time for you to do, it’s going to help you go through data much quicker, when it’s not going to do is it’s not going to write your report for you, your bill just handed off to your teacher, it may write a report for you, but you need to go over it and double check it to make sure that it’s accurate. Makes sense. Because that’s one of the problems or challenges with AI, is that it does help us do things quicker, but still, there needs to be oversight. So as a nine year old, it’s an exciting time, that you’re gonna be able to do a lot more, you’re gonna be able to access a lot more. But you still need to understand what you’re looking at and learn along the way. So that would be my explanation to AI. And again, it could be content, right? If you have to read a report, get more context, write a report, have to do some research, things like that. And even if you’re given a big story, that they want you to put a summary on it, you can actually have AI, dump it in there and give you a summary to look at over and again, all of this with, you need to double check the work to make sure it’s accurate and things like that. So
Dean Waye 02:58
So how’s it going to be used by agencies or marketing teams or even CMOS? What are they going to do? What will they be able to do that they can’t do today?
Casey Powers 03:10
Everything I just said but quicker? So that’s a great question. Because I just met with a group yesterday. And this is probably the second time I’ve heard this, I said my content, right? There’s our producer, do more content than they ever have using AI but there’s problems with it. Things to AI, construction, company time and attendance, tracking, whatever that is. And it’s creating all this content and pushing it back. And they’re just lightly going over and saying it’s okay. You know, there’s a couple of subjects you have in here, like understanding who the person is, things like that, you still need to understand your market, you need to understand the persona, your ICP, things like that, that doesn’t change.
Dean Waye 03:56
Okay. All right. Anything else? I believe it’s gonna ask good questions from perspectives. Okay. So if I’m, if I’m a CEO, but I need things explained to me, like I’m not okay. And I say, Casey. So like, if I’m hiring a CMO, or they’re telling me about something, like, what’s the killer question to make sure they’re not about to go off the rails or waste a bunch of my money and time? What do I need to ask the CMO about AI?
Casey Powers 04:32
Yeah, I would I would ask the CMO. How are you going to use AI? How do you think it’s going to change what you did differently last year? What’s what’s going to be the differentiation there? Tell me how you’re going to use it. And another one, I’ll speak with some folks about using all these different services. And one of the challenges that I’ve uncovered speaking with some CEOs and some of the SAS services is the churn and I asked why are they churning and Same thing I would ask the CMO, do you understand the problem? You’re trying to solve using AI? Are the people around you that are going to benefit from it? Do they understand what AI is going to provide for them? And this isn’t necessary. You know, AI, like we used to say tech for technology’s sake. Doesn’t make sense. So a saving of AI, if it’s not going to solve the problem out as a CMO, tell me what problem you’re going to solve how we’re going to be better off, more, more strategic by using AI? And the answer can’t be a broad answer, I would want specific answers back from the seat of the CMO, I would say, I’m gonna analyze our KPIs much better, it’s going to help us determine what messaging to send to certain folks from the funnel. I would also do some research on our existing customer base using AI to say, Okay, who was the persona that signed the contract? How long did it take? Which channel? Did they come in? All those things can be done much easier? Through AI using the right tools? So that’s what I want to see. Okay.
Dean Waye 06:00
I have a question. This might be a bit blunt. Okay. So I, I don’t do the graphic side, in marketing or advertising, but I write a lot of ads. I write TV ads, and I write online ads. And I’ve been fascinated with this tool, ad creative.ai. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. Basically, it will make you can like, I can write the copy. And I can like put it in a headline. So you know, the hook, everything, the hardest part is coming up with the hook, right. And then on the graphic side, I can just plug it into the AI tool, and it will generate 100 different variations. Right, it’ll stick to colors and branding, if I want it to, but otherwise, it’ll create, it’ll put in new stock photos, it will put in new shapes, it’ll create 100 of them. And, and you know, in a second. And then if I wanted to, I could just like load all those up. And then let Facebook tell me which ones actually like successful. That’s an example of what you’re talking about, where one person with an AI tool can take the place of like multiple people. Right?
Casey Powers 07:15
Yes, and to your point, like the like the old saying the ABX test is kind of gone away. It’s the ABCD, EFG, H, et cetera, that you can now test because you can create the content, as you said, quicker, the hooks things like that. But I still you know, I know you, Dean, you’re a great writer, I see your emails and stuff like that. And, again, I’m a big fan of AI and like everyone else is you know, blah, blah, blah, but you got to really pay attention to make sure just because it’s sent, created 20 different ads and landing pages and hooks and things like that, that’s still representing your brand. So you got to be careful that the right hooks so to speak is out there. And you’re right. So you can you can test much more frequently, and get the results back quicker. And
Dean Waye 07:59
so I thought it was fascinating that it could do like the graphics and creative side, just like spinning off iterations. So I was like, it’s still clunky, right? And it’s still repetitive and kind of boring. But on the other hand, you know, if I didn’t know any better, I could just have it make 25 ads and go. So yeah. Okay. So a couple of people have joined three action. So guys, guys, yes. Okay. So a quick recap of what we do here. I am a CEO who only understands things when they’re Dillard told to him at a nine year olds level, we have a list of topics, here they are. You pick a topic, where you think you could explain to a nine year old CEO with a nine year old man, you know, comprehensive level for marketing. In other words, you have to understand what you’re talking about and simplify it. And you just pick a topic and if you’re ready, you just tell me you’re ready. We’ll jump into it. And you’re gonna explain one of these topics to me like I’m nine years old. Who wants to go next? Casey was brave enough to go first. You’re all experts in at least one of these. Okay, Sarah, which one you want?
Sarah Falcon 09:24
Marketing Strategy.
Dean Waye 09:25
Okay. And go.
Ilan Vagenshtein 09:29
Okay. So, a marketing strategy seems so big and overwhelming. But talking specifically to CEOs and marketing strategies should get you should define where marketing slots in in your vast toolset to reach your business objectives. So it’s not about looking at the great expanse of marketing opportunities and tailoring it to the business is defining what The business objectives are, and then seeing where the reality is against this. objectives. So, what I find most important is to understand who is your target? What first, what are your business objectives? Are you building to sell? Are you building to get more consumers? Are you building to a b2b company or you’re building a revenue engine? Right? Like being super clear about what it is? The executives are? And then understanding what is your ideal customer profile or your ideal investor profile? A SWOT analysis to say, given that given, these are the people, right marketing is just talking to people. Given that these are the people we want to talk to what’s the SWOT analysis that says, What are we doing? correctly? And we’re competitors. And I keep challenging CEOs about who their competitors are, right? So working with a financial institution, right, their competitors or local financial institutions, but also tick tock influencers? Who are like, yeah, like, it’s simply a crypto game, right? Like, your your creditors may be very different than who they were 10 years ago, and it’s not geographic, it is, who is taking attention, who’s taking the attention, that you want it that you want to have? And then doing a current state analysis, and then and then building a to my mind, a marketing strategy should work, it should be a highly reasonable, highly executional, like highly executable, highly doable. roadmap for slotting in marketing to achieve your business goals. Okay,
Dean Waye 11:52
let me ask some really dumb questions. So like, I’m a founder, and this is my company, and you’re my new CMO, fractional CMO. You’re talking to me about marketing strategy. And I don’t yet have in my head, what that deliverable for want of a better word is, so is that a presentation? Is that a project plan? Is that a calendar? of what’s going to be done? On what days? Right? Is it a Word document? Is that he multimedia performative art with no kind of presentation?
Ilan Vagenshtein 12:30
Yeah, it starts with an interpretive dance. And then we just get to know, we see how we feel anything. So for me, it’s a short document, it is a budget, which, which, which is essentially the plan of the activities we’re going to do and how much it’s going to cost. It’s a tracking document, which says, These are the KPIs that we’re tracking against, and this is how we’re going to measure it. And it’s a it’s a detailed calendar of activities, right? This is, these are the campaigns and tactics we’re going to execute against.
Dean Waye 13:06
All right. All right, now I understand it. And it like explodes out at some point to like actual staffers who are going to do things.
Ilan Vagenshtein 13:16
Yeah. And that’s a good point. And depending on the structure of your organization, and might be like a racy, right, it might be defining who are the people in which roles and who’s going to do which part of it? All right.
Dean Waye 13:30
All right. Excellent. Thank you. All right. Who else wants to explain, Sarah, you did a great job. Also Casey. Thank you. I often forget or I’m not good at saying thank you to compliments. So you, I think you complimented my writing and my email list? So thank you for that. I should have done that before. At least I remember now. And not like Sunday. All right. So who’s got a topic they want to tackle? All right, here’s a lot and a lot of what are you going to talk about?
Ilan Vagenshtein 14:02
Let’s talk about content marketing. Okay. Go sir.
Dean Waye 14:09
So, all marketing is the same to me. So explain to me, you know, as the founder with, you know, and wants everything explained as an annual or why why is content what is content marketing? And why is it different than or what’s what’s its, what’s its place in the universe of marketing? Sure,
Ilan Vagenshtein 14:26
absolutely. Content marketing is all the types of content or almost all the types of content that you will create, whether it’s sweetened content, video, podcasts, etc. In order to attract customers or attract prospects in order to retain customers and everything else. It’s literally everything. Some things outside of it, like public relations, for example, it’s also content but it’s really handled elsewhere. Content marketing is, goes throughout the everything the dog has nutrition does. Now, here are some questions, some real questions that CEOs asked me. The first question is, what type of content do you recommend? Should we do or weaken content like blogs? Or white papers or articles? Should we do more videos? And the answer is all of the above. The reason is that each person, each one of us, has their own perceptions have their own way of consuming content of understanding things. Some people’s we felt we didn’t like white papers, some prefer some people would prefer a short, say, a 60 to 92nd video that explains the exact same concept, but in a visual way. So it’s all about preferences. And you have to cover all of it, in order to achieve it in order to address all of the audience. In addition to that, you need another type of question is, is the same kind of golden bullet type of content. And there isn’t really, the reason is that you need different types of content throughout the life of the cycle that you have with your customers. For example, at first, when they don’t know about you, when they just research the market, you need content that educates them in general about the market about yourself. And as you go down, in the down the cycle or down the pipeline, you need more specific content about your product, your features, the benefits that you will generate for them, etc, etc. So you really need a lot of it, in order to drive campaigns in order to attract customers in order to serve them along this along the cycle that they have with you.
Dean Waye 17:16
Now, when I think of content or content marketing, I think of social media. And I think of search engines is that most of it,
Ilan Vagenshtein 17:27
I wouldn’t say it’s most of it, there’s a lot more, there’s also content that can be on. So social media and SEO, social media is a delivery tool. A delivery tool can also be a website delivery tool can be a blog platform. And SEO is deadly in order to promote people to get to certain places, usually a website. So these are tools that are helpful, but it’s not content per se.
Dean Waye 18:01
And why do this instead of just advertising?
Ilan Vagenshtein 18:05
Um, great question. First of all, if you can advertise, first of all, it depends on the on what exactly it is that you do. In my world of b2b technology, technology, marketing, you address a very, very specific, targeted niche of people. You cannot always reach them with advertising, even with targeted advertising on LinkedIn, you cannot always reach them. If you’re talking about TV or radio, it will be a huge waste of money. Advertising is typically very expensive. Now, if you’re talking about advertising, like Google ads, again, it’s not targeting. But even advertising doesn’t fully explain what it is that you do and it doesn’t answer all of the questions that customers have.
Dean Waye 19:03
Okay, and is it cheaper than advertising?
Ilan Vagenshtein 19:07
It depends on what you do. It should be cheaper. But again, it depends on what you do. You need good people to create content. I wouldn’t advise leveraging AI from from scratch until the end because AI still creates relatively generic content. It’s not yet maybe someday it will be but it’s not yet a replacement for human being. So for example, in order to create a written content usually just need one or two people, someone to write it and afterwards someone to review and edit. In order to create, say a customer video success story, you need an entire team you need videographers. You need an editor you need, usually a makeup artist to put some makeup on your customer, you need an audio specialist for the recording, etc, etc. So the cost can add up.
Dean Waye 20:15
So is it fair to say content marketing is a volume game? I mean, advertising is not necessarily a volume game, but it’s definitely like a repetition game. But content marketing is a volume game, you should always be making more stuff. That’s sort of the strategy for content marketing, right? Yes,
Ilan Vagenshtein 20:32
it is. You should be making more but not at the expense of quality. So you should be making more content, but also good quality content, not not trash.
Dean Waye 20:53
Sorry, I had to send someone a no, it’s getting noisy in here. Okay, what’s like the one takeaway? Or what’s like the one question if I hire a fractional CMO, and the CMO is really sort of pushing content marketing is the way to go? Like, what’s that one killer question so I can make sure they’re not just like full of crap.
Ilan Vagenshtein 21:12
I’m stim what is the goal? What is the
Dean Waye 21:16
what should the goal be?
Ilan Vagenshtein 21:17
What is the content plan, at the end of the day, the goal should be to bring in prospects, the goal of marketing for everything at the end of the day is to generate revenue for for the company, it’s to support the top line. Ask them how the content how what they will be doing, will support that how will it help sales? How will it help bring more leads, etc, etc.
Dean Waye 21:44
Okay. All right. Anything else about content marketing?
Ilan Vagenshtein 21:51
Well, this is the natural for a nine year old, like you asked. I can say a lot about content marketing, but that’s me
Dean Waye 21:58
like parting points you want to make
Ilan Vagenshtein 22:06
I think the main thing that one of the interesting things about content marketing, is that you need to also address another challenge, which is the audience attention span. When I started back, because of video, for example, 20 years ago, there used to be four or five, six minutes long. Today, a 60 to 90 seconds video is considered, okay, two minutes is bodily long. people’s attention span is shortening. It goes from videos, goes for written contracts. But you need to get to the point much faster and addressed what they understand what the customer or the prospect wants, and address it.
Dean Waye 22:58
Okay. All right. Make sense? Okay. Oh, you’ll have to raise your hand because I had to put everyone on mute. Thank you along. Mark. All right, my man. Mark, what’s your topic?
Marc Fuentes 23:16
A CMO is the linchpin. All right,
Dean Waye 23:18
I knew someone was gonna get to that one eventually. That’s like the candied apple in this entire list.
Marc Fuentes 23:25
Well, I was gonna talk about a different one. But I thought I, I talked to the CMO linchpin because I may be able to bring something else in there. So let’s start off. So as a nine year old cmo isn’t linchpin. I think first defining what a CMO you
Dean Waye 23:41
have got a lot of managers in this company. I’ve got a lot of like VP or C level, folks, right? I got someone who’s taking care of finance, and I got someone who’s taking care of sales. We got someone in operations, I got a CTO, I, you know why the CMO was linchpin?
Marc Fuentes 23:58
For a couple of reasons, I think first reason is, customers expectations are changing rapidly. You need to have a voice at the table. And that voice needs to be fine tuned and connected to your customers. And that’s in essence, that’s the CMOS job he or she needs to be the voice of the customer that table. So as the business is making decisions, strategic decisions around where the company is going, why should we pursue adjacent strategies, new products, new services doubled on a certain market go globally stay Originally, the CMO should be answering those questions or have a voice at the table which becomes the linchpin. And he or she should be continued to be viewed as the voice of the customer. And they can be viewed as the voice of the customer unless they’re doing the work with the customer and consistently getting in the market. Understanding investing in understand the customer’s voice, whether that’s coming to the web, whether that’s sitting down face to face with a customer whether that’s a A key OKR the CMO holds for himself or herself and the rest of their team. How many customers? Did you speak to this quarter? And what did you hear? And how does it impact the strategy that we’re working towards? Well, how does it start to put new new information or new, new new diverse thoughts that we need to be thinking about as the strategy continues to unfold? The second piece is from a linchpin perspective, the CFO needs to understand what the CEO, where is that business? Is that a? Are you looking for a sales driven type of cmo to support a sales driven organization, whereas a lot of campaigning integration, a lot of execution around leads and qualified pipeline and SQL while he was strategic CMO, that you’re trying to guide the organization now into a new direction? You know, how do you do that very different skill set from someone who’s coming in to support. And I’m going to use this as a just as an example. But if you’re coming into support as a Xerox lead organization, you’re probably coming in as as more of a sales side cmo to support the execution. If you’re coming in as a as an a CMO that’s now looking at organization to expand get into new markets, adjacent, you’re probably more on the strategic side. And vice versa, if you’re coming in as like a, like a CMO, to basically now start building the actual process, it’s a different skill set of coming in and figuring out what is the right org structure needs to look like? What’s the right investment? I’ve got a tam or 5 billion? Well, that’s great, but how do you actually lay out the the pieces in there to say, we’re not gonna get to 10% of that time with the budget we have, but we’re gonna get to 2% of the time, and we need to be comfortable with 2% of that particular time, or whatever it is. So is that took a CMO and saying, again, using the voice of the customer using the market dynamics where the market is going, putting those together? And when when we’re saying, Hey, let’s go with 10%? Timeout? No, we don’t have the budget, nor do we have the team know that we have the ability to grow at 10% a day. But if that’s where we want to be in three years, how does the CMO linchpin now set up the organization to go and run at that pace? So number of things around the beginning to really the key focus of being that linchpin is the voice of the customer and continuing to ask the CEO for investment in the voice of the customer in every search, continuing to do it, but also asking the CEO to be locked? Sort of, instead, as to how else can I be supporting this evangelization of the customer? So
Dean Waye 27:38
it’s got a question? Don’t you think that the head of sales would say that they’re the voice of the customer?
Marc Fuentes 27:52
No, they’re the voice of the customer who is in a buying motion. And that is a customer salesperson being in the pipeline being given qualified pipeline to go sell to a customer who is in that 5% factor of buying now, the 95% of the customers, I don’t know that problem, I don’t know if I have that problem. But that’s where the linchpin of the CMO comes in and say, Hey, let me help you understand that problem better, let me help you, you know, sell that problem in your organization. So it bubbles up as one of the key projects, because if you solve it, here’s the ROI you can actually deliver. So while sales have a view of the 5%, that’s in mind, I think the CMO and their organization holds the next 95%, which really guides the organization as to where they put their investment in their budgets.
Dean Waye 28:41
And do you think sales, thinks they’re the voice of the customer, you’ve just explained why they’re not.
Marc Fuentes 28:50
I think they think they are contributing voice into that. And in in the CMO, being the linchpin, he or she should not alienate any voices in the organization. But they should be the glue to bring out different voices and different elements of what that customer DNA is made up of. And sales being a key contributor to it, that cmo should be closely tied to sales in extracting that information. But it’s not a it’s not a one to one sort of street in the actual C suite is a CMO. You need to be working through different elements of it, to figure it out, even even with the CTO, what are you hearing from the Gartner world around where technology is going and you know where it’s cloud going? So you factor the CMO and say, hey, you know, do we have that type of thinking in our tech stack? So it’s really it’s really a multitude, but he or she needs to continue to own the voice when there’s something happening with that customer that linchpin goes back and say no, that is not what we what we’ve been hearing in the marketplace. Here’s what we’ve probably been hearing. But if you have a you know, a real belief that that’s where the market is going, give us some time to investigate that and come back He what a hypothesis that says, Yeah, we go, oh, no, we don’t.
Dean Waye 30:07
Alright, so if I have a CMO who’s sort of like making the case, that marketing and by extension, the CMO is the linchpin for the companies sort of, you know, forward velocity? And what direction to go in? What’s the like? What’s the one question I want to ask? So that I can tell if that cmo like knows what they’re talking about? Or is trying to like, you know, snow me?
Marc Fuentes 30:36
What’s the one question you can ask the CEO? Or you’re the CEO is asking the CMO? Yeah,
Dean Waye 30:40
the CEO CEO would ask the CMO.
Marc Fuentes 30:45
How do we continue to unlock value with our customers and ensure that we’re always staying one step ahead of them?
Dean Waye 30:53
What does it mean to unlock value?
Marc Fuentes 30:57
And good, good, call it because it’s speaking to nine year olds here. So let me go back and remove that word unlock. So to unlock value would be how do we actually just ensure that what we’re selling and the ROI that we’re delivering into that particular space, it’s truly impactful, and it’s quantifiable. So you know, whether that’s simple things of improving workflows to reduce costs, take costs out of workflows, improve productivity, you know, remove certain elements within a workflow that’s causing increased cost, whether it be people or people being the big one, but it’s really all those value type drivers in there that if the CFC is asking the CMO is, you know, the key question would be how do we continue to deliver value, manage our value and create value? And I think he or she has a Simoni son needs to really be able to articulate what is it that they’re doing around those three steps. Okay.
Dean Waye 32:03
All right. That’s great. That’s awesome. Thanks. All right. Thank you, who’s got a topic they want to tackle? Thanks. Tom, one second. What’s your topic? Sir?
Tom Kuhr 32:18
I will take marketing as the hub of the business
Dean Waye 32:21
for 900. Gotcha, done the 900. D. Marketing. However, the business Yes, sir. Go. So
Tom Kuhr 32:31
marketing today is a lot different than marketing 10 years ago. And I would say sales used to be the hub of the business. But now I see marketing, as I see it. A football coach, the offensive coach, and sometimes the defensive coach for a football team where sales and the head of sales is the quarterback, they’re calling the plays on the ground. But marketing is taking a look at the competition, they’re taking a look at what happened last week, they’re taking a look at player fitness or taking a look at what what plays worked, what plays didn’t, they’re constantly updating the programming, and taking a look at the environment in in the game environment and the next matchup and what that looks like. So it’s a it becomes a much more strategic role around the business in that it along the lines of what we just went through, actually, which is it’s a it’s a linchpin, truly representing the customer, but it’s the whole market. And it’s almost better to think of marketing as market when it when it when you’re not talking about advertising and promotion, it’s really bringing that intelligence to the entire business, to the customer success team, to the product team, by all of these things, all those different departments are customer facing. And just because of customer facing, they’re all bringing back bits of information at different levels, different times about competitors, about everything in marketing, marketing stops, is to assemble that and make sense out of it and then deliver it as consistent updates to the story to the narrative and to the players that the company is executing against. Okay,
Dean Waye 34:27
so a couple questions. I’m a founder CEO who likes things explained, like I’m a nine year old, my buddy, another founder said that you don’t even really need marketing anymore because you can do product lead growth.
Tom Kuhr 34:42
So product lead growth is very interesting. It requires a more of a technical marketing or product marketing skill set. So you’re going to want to find a marketing leader with If that skill set with, with product lead growth experience, but it’s still absolutely marketing it, it’s saying what in this product? Is someone going to want to share? Or how are we going to connect to other people who are similar through the product to make it grow through the product, not through traditional advertising content marketing, sponsorship, that that sort of, I guess the traditional look at what marketing does, which is from either paid or earned or organic promotion. So it’s product promotion, leveraging the
Dean Waye 35:39
building marketability into the product design, correct. Okay, so
Tom Kuhr 35:43
it still is marketing, it’s just a different flavor of marketing that network products allow us to do.
Dean Waye 35:51
And instead of being like marketing, as the hub of the business or marketing lead business, can’t they just hire more salespeople?
Tom Kuhr 36:01
You can always hire more salespeople or
Dean Waye 36:02
sales businesses, right? Are
Tom Kuhr 36:05
those salespeople going to be successful? Are they going to go out and prospect for themselves. And today, because 70% in business to business environments, 70% of research is done before anyone speaks to a salesperson that 70% is a huge opportunity to educate, to train to create an advisory relationship with a potential prospect. And that’s really the job of content marketing, get in front of them before they’re ready to buy. So that when they are ready to buy, they know who to turn to. And when they do reach out to a salesperson, that salesperson can obviously do the tactical here, you’re in the deal cycle. But all the research beforehand is marketing’s job. So it’s almost impossible to say, you can just run a business on sales after the first 20 customers. Right.
Dean Waye 36:58
All right. So let me like wrap this up. So I’m the CEO slash founder. I like understanding things that a ninth grade, nine year old level, what grade is a nine year old?
Tom Kuhr 37:12
Four year old is
Dean Waye 37:17
fourth grade. Yeah. And, okay. And so we I’m talking to a potential or recently hired fractional CMO, and we get on to the idea of like a marketing lead marketing as the hub of the business. And like, what’s the like? What’s the really? What’s a question that I can ask that fractional cmo that’s gonna make me sound really smart?
Tom Kuhr 37:40
Have has the fractional cmo actually worked in a different part of the business? Do they understand how that different part of the business operates? Because they’ve spent time there if they refer to other departments as other departments, and they’re not looking at them, like, they’re all part of a go to market team. And they all have different parts to play in that go to market strategy. That’s, that’s a red flag that the marketing person is very contained in their world of marketing, rather than they’re trying to represent the bigger environment of the market.
Dean Waye 38:19
Right. All right. Anything else from you, sir?
Tom Kuhr 38:23
That’s all I got on that topic. All
Dean Waye 38:26
right. Let me bring up the topics again. Thank you. I think I can unmute everybody at this point. You asked me, What’s your topic? Wait, hold on. Sorry, you’re the one person I forgot to sorry. Naturally, the only person I forgot to unmute is the one person I would call on. That’s just how it works.
Yasmine de Aranda 38:50
No worries, I was gonna I was gonna choose marketing as the hub of the business. But you did that so well. So I’m going to pick measurement and KPI is
Dean Waye 38:59
possibly the least sexy of all topics. I know you are taking takers.
Tom Kuhr 39:05
What’s important?
Yasmine de Aranda 39:09
So if I was to explain that to my nine year olds, what I would say would be imagine you’re running and you have an end line or a finish line to get to. You’ve got obviously, you know, goal, your goal is to get to that finish line. However, how would you? How would you figure out if you’re improving over time? So yes, you can get to the finish line, but how about if we try and put a target of time to that? The best way to figure out measurements and KPIs is to identify is to be able to identify what is it that’s going to make an increase or change what’s affecting the speed that you get to that finish line? So if we were to take running and say, Okay, great. Let’s look at the number of rounds that you’re going to do. Let’s look at To the speed at which you’re going to do your turns? And then let’s figure out how is it that we’re going to improve that. Because from the get go, you might say, you know, what I’m gonna get, you know, the whole equipment, I’m gonna get the best shoes and the best, you know, shorts and the best, I don’t know what I’m gonna run on, you know, inside versus outside. I’m not a runner. So please don’t, you know, don’t use that against me. But that would be I think, you know, one way to express measurements and what is that we’re going to improve, to be able to get to our goal, you know, as fast as we can. So thinking through the lens of time, you’re gonna say, great, you know, like, the first time, it took me three minutes to get to my finish line. What are the, you know, micro KPIs that are indicators that I’m actually getting better over time? Is it just time? Is it time versus, you know, not, you know, the time versus the round, like, how many trends I’ve actually had to get to to get to my inline. So I think that that would be really one of the easiest way to get somebody to understand KPIs and to be able to understand what it is that they need to improve.
Dean Waye 41:11
If I’m this founder, slash CEO, right? At a minimum, what are the one or two or as many as three? Like what are the one two or three metrics out of marketing, that I should always pay attention to, to see if we’re getting better or worse in some way? Like, what should I be scared of? If something’s changing in the
Yasmine de Aranda 41:36
I mean, obviously, you know, like, I like to be able to measure the KPIs along all of the funnel, so all of the buying journey and every step of that funnel, so from the time that you’re educating the customer, through to the time that you know, you’re getting them interested, or considering they’re making ready to make a decision, they’re now activated their onboarding. And we get through to the retention and referral process. So those are all for me key metrics that should be in place from the get go. And the sooner you can put them in place. The sooner you can put them in place isn’t going to stop? Sorry, the sooner you’re going to put them in place, the sooner you’re going to have the data points to actually provide a benchmark as to what’s improving what’s not improving, because they’re all indicating something at different stages of the journey. So are you gonna
Dean Waye 42:35
ask me to buy you some kind of software or platform so you can automatically track where people are?
Yasmine de Aranda 42:41
If you don’t have a baseline CRM? I think that you’re obviously you know, if you’re running out of Excel sheets, I would say, yes, invest into a CRM, and set this up in a way that you can actually track all of your metrics or the baseline metrics. Because an Arr, or Mr. Or retention is not enough, like they’re all related to context, you need to be able to, to have an initial benchmark, and to be able to say, okay, you know, where can we improve? What are indicators that, you know, red flags, that there are something that needs to be digged into and look deeper into that. So just looking at number of like, the pipeline is just not enough, looking at the number of closed, one per month is just not enough. So it’s always it’s always going to be measuring over time. So how did we do last month? How did we do last year less than a quarter, so you’re looking at seasonality, you’re looking at, you know, different elements that could affect so just, you know, basing yourself on just number of customers ARR is just not enough, or MRR is just not enough. We need to be able to look at, you know, a full set of metrics that are owned by marketing and sales and customer success. Hence, you know, the whole marketing as a hub. It’s just it’s not one or the other. It’s really everybody collectively looking at the same data points to be able to decide how can we all help? How can each of our departments and function, support those numbers and support our goals? So
Dean Waye 44:20
there’s a better than average chance that if I’m a co founder, and I don’t have any experience in marketing, the only metric I’ve ever heard of, is the Net Promoter Score. Sorry? Yes. So can you explain what net promoter score is and how its measured? And do I need to care about it?
Yasmine de Aranda 44:42
You do need to care about it because it is an indicator of whether or not people would actually refer to your product to a friend. So it’s, it’s one number, that could be a good indicator of whether it works. So if you’re still, you know, the early founder, or the startup and you’re looking to figure If you have product market fit, depending if you’re in b2b or b2c, you would look at a net promoter score to kind of assess whether or not your product is bringing value to your customers. And it could flag it’s just that one question of, let’s say, would you refer that? You know, would you refer that to a friend? And just even from that question, you’d get a sense of, Okay, is there something off with the product? Or you could have it graded from one to 10? How much would you grade that? And then anything that’s below an eight, you know, you need to look back and figure out what’s wrong with the product and reestablish product market fit. So it’s a good indicator, but it’s not the only metric. Yeah, I just
Dean Waye 45:43
want to make sure I understand a point that you made in your answer. You said that it’s an indicator of whether we’re delivering value to the customers, but it’s it, it literally can’t be that right. It, isn’t it? And I’m no expert in NPS. But it’s isn’t it more accurate to say that it’s a measurement of whether the customers think you’re delivering value, as opposed to a measurement of if you’re delivering value? Absolutely.
Yasmine de Aranda 46:13
All right.
Dean Waye 46:17
How much should I care about MPs? It’s the only one I know, right? This are affected our fictional CEO, see only one I’ve ever heard
Yasmine de Aranda 46:25
of. Yeah, it’s not, it’s not gonna be
Dean Waye 46:27
enough to hire a company to measure it for me or what?
Yasmine de Aranda 46:31
No, you would be able to send out a survey on a Google Doc and just ask your customers and survey your customers. So that’s probably an easy process, the same way that you could actually implement a software, if you’re in b2b, and all the b2b SaaS or b2c SAS even and have a pop up, you know, at some point, after you’ve established that they should have seen value, or after their first, let’s say, month of subscription to kind of see, you know, hey, is this really working for you or not? And
Dean Waye 47:01
there are, there are some marketing metrics, like ad performance and downloads and like clicks and stuff, or they can be literally track second by second. But NPS, how often? Like, at a minimum, what a marketing department sort of like, want, they’re at a minimum, like, get their NPS score, like updated?
Yasmine de Aranda 47:24
Um, I have no idea. But I would do that regularly, you know, as the product shifts, or depending on how long your customer lifetime cycle is, what I wouldn’t do is not every time that, you know, you’re, you’re seeing that same customer makes a transaction, he shouldn’t get, you know, a survey that pops up to say, you know, hey, do you love us? So no, you know, like, I’m gonna get sick of you asking me that same question. So there needs to be, you know, tools in place so that you can really segment down and hone in on that ideal customer profile, and send those people that surveys so that, you know, again, you’re not trying to, to get an answer. You’re trying to get a segmented answer, as opposed to, you know, are we the best fit for everyone?
Dean Waye 48:08
So if I’m that CEO, founder, and I remember to go ask what our NPS is today, and it hasn’t been updated in six months. Do I care or not care?
Yasmine de Aranda 48:27
That’s a very good question. I like questions are very Yeah, they’re they’re pretty, pretty awesome. I mean, I don’t you know,
Dean Waye 48:34
I’m good at it. Yeah.
Yasmine de Aranda 48:38
I’m not the right market or for that. Somebody else.
Dean Waye 48:42
Anybody else? On the minimum duration between NPS updates? Six months should be good. Casey’s got a strong opinion, girlfriend.
Casey Powers 48:55
Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Okay? Yeah. Dan, you’re driving me crazy, because there’s so many things I want to scream out. Everyone’s doing such a great job. It’s like. So obviously, I want to talk about NPS because it was a big deal. We had 8000 customers, 400,000 users, right. So they’re pretty big company. And we sent out a lot of marketing, there’s a lot of things going on. So one of the biggest concerns we had NPS was very important, by the way to at different times, right when you’re seeing churn and things like that NPS is a huge thing that’s going on. But what we determined was marketing had to be very careful with texts, Port updates and emails is that the last thing a customer wants is another form to fill out or another question being asked that was, that was the key there and we did it. I want to say about every six months we did it but it was planned out. We put it into Calendar two, I wanted to make sure that look, I don’t want anything going out to the customer for three weeks. I want to make sure I get the NPS score back and it was absolutely important and but Got someone else has also been interviewing your customers have been telling you what’s working, what’s not anyway? Yeah, so yes.
Tom Kuhr 50:09
I’ve worked in SAS and actually putting an NPS widget on the user screens when they log in is a great way to do it without actually sending them another communication where they can just click a click a box in which it goes away. Which you can do almost continuously. Yeah.
Dean Waye 50:32
So like micro surveying, basically.
Tom Kuhr 50:35
Yeah, it’s a constant heartbeat, on your user base. And then it didn’t reappear for another two months, I think, per user, so we could record who responded and who didn’t. So
Dean Waye 50:48
he has been what’s my takeaway? Like our if our meeting is winding down me in this rational CML? Like, what’s my takeaway? What’s the one question I want to make sure I ask and get a killer answer to around metrics and
Yasmine de Aranda 51:00
KeePass. You have the right tools tech in place to be able to measure the baseline numbers from the get go.
Dean Waye 51:10
And the tools that I should take care of some of the math and statistics validity and stuff for me, right?
Yasmine de Aranda 51:17
If you set them up,
Dean Waye 51:20
like that’s only that’s only mildly terrifying. So thanks very much. Yeah. Might end up with numbers that are like very different than what they actually are exact. Exact. Oh, that’s awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, we got a little bit of time left. Does anyone want like one last swing of the bat? One other topic? Can I tell you the most unloved topic of the entire thing, having done two of these sessions now, campaigns are the I the only topic that I think no one’s ever talked on? And no takers today either.
Tom Kuhr 51:58
It’s, it’s almost too big. And too, like, you could speak to it like it’s a Wikipedia article. But with more specificity, it’s really hard to describe that. Alright,
Dean Waye 52:12
then in the last six minutes, does anyone want to take on all customers or people first?
Tom Kuhr 52:21
I’m happy to do that one. Okay.
Dean Waye 52:25
So Chris minutes, let’s roll. All
Tom Kuhr 52:27
customers are people, they are not numbers, they are not statistics. They are not leads, they’re not prospects, they are people. And one of the real keys of a advanced marketing program is really understanding why people buy. And those those principles of why people buy anything, don’t change, they haven’t changed since the Victorian era, people buy for the same reasons. Their emotional benefits, there are logical benefits, there are societal benefits to making a purchase. And the underlying the underpinning, that’s really what the key to marketing is, is is hitting on those basic fundamental buying instincts of somebody happens in sales, clearly. But being able to bring the elements of buying behaviors and buying habits into marketing really makes marketing programs resonate. And then you can actually start to talk about campaigns and how they affect things. So buying habits have changed, people do things a little bit differently than they did before COVID. But the fundamentals of why we buy really haven’t. So if you treat people like you treat a developer, in the same way you treat a sales leader, when you’re selling different pieces of software to them, or selling consumer packaged goods to them, they’re going to have a need to make that purchase. And that’s really what you wanted to hit on. What’s the need? How are we going to uncover the need that we’re, we’re we’re banding together around from a from a product and marketing perspective. But just understanding that people are human, and they have human tendencies, and that drives that drives their need to not buy or buy at any specific time. Will it humanizes all of our processes and all of our thinking and it allows us to stop taking a look at aggregate metrics and start taking a look at though real reasons the wins the losses and the stories that go along with those because that really contributes to great narratives and great grades Sales rebuttals to great playbooks really hitting on the one thing, not just describing your product, describing it in context for the customer and their needs.
Dean Waye 55:11
I tell when I’m doing the top level copywriting for clients, I think, and b2c, I’m trying to get exactly one reaction at the end of all this, which is I need that. And in b2b, I tell them, the one reaction I’m trying to get is, my manager should talk to these guys. And like, that’s it, I said, anything else is just, you know, you know, subject to that go by what’s on the screen. Now, if you can read it, is the only time in my entire life, watching a documentary, it’s the only time in my life I’ve ever yelled bullshit at a screen. Because there was a documentary and they were talking about how like 99 Well, 99% of human history was spent in the stone age and his bullshit. And I went and looked it up. And like, Holy God, I can’t believe that 99% of all of our brains evolution is in the stone age. The way I explain to my clients now, as I mostly specialize in the first couple or three seconds of somebody’s attention, like that’s basically what I write for everything else I write is just sort of like another three seconds. And I say, even in b2b, the all the first moments of attention are always Stone Age tension. So I only care about urgency, or difference in the environment, like imagine, like you’re walking into, like, you know, part of the woods, you’ve never been in before, right? You’re checking to make sure you’re not about to die, you’re checking to see like, what’s different than like, what I know before what’s changed, right? You’re I’m looking at anything that’s interesting, but I can postpone or put off, investigating it for a bit. And then everything else is just background, and I can ignore it. And there’s no difference between somebody doing that 100,000 years ago, and somebody’s sitting in front of their Gmail inbox, and looking at like, the top 20 emails that are currently in there, like, is there anything urgent? Do I have something from my boss? Is there something that’s kind of like interesting or novel or entertaining? Is there something that I know I have to read it, but it’s gonna require some focus attention a bit of time, I only have nine minutes on my next meeting. So I’ll just mark it back as unread, right? It’s already marked as red, I’m going to unread it, and then like, just leave it there. And then everything else is just like junk.
Tom Kuhr 57:18
Now the only the only other basic fundamental is FOMO. Is someone else doing it? And I should be doing it too. Yeah. Which is getting bigger and bigger role, but they’re all fundamental prioritization, and emotional reactions to things.
Dean Waye 57:38
All right, so we’ve hit our end. Does anyone have any last thoughts? Does anyone want to roll this out? Everybody’s anxious to get into the weekend. What do we got? Anybody have a like a last comment? They want to make her a parting shot? Or just to remind the founders, they shouldn’t be nine years old. Anything?
Casey Powers 58:01
I’d like to say Yes, Tom, what you’re saying I want it to be very, very quick with the very beginning. Yes, I understand your market understanding you’re talking to make that emotional connection. Right. We all agree on that. So that was how you started off with what people are, understand who they are, make that emotional connection with them in Dean’s case in three seconds? Yeah.
Tom Kuhr 58:21
There was some restrictions is a good time. Yeah,
Dean Waye 58:23
there was some politician. I think they were on like, you know, the right side of the spectrum of the business side of the spectrum. There’s some politician when I was kid, a teenager. And it’s the only line I remember from, like politics at all, when I was a teenager, where someone some kind of debate or something I was, yeah, but the guy said, Yeah, but ultimately, y’all need to understand, right? There’s only one, you’re talking about layers of government. And there’s federal and there’s like state, and there’s municipal, but there’s only a one layer of taxpayer. And so everything else is just piled up on top of that taxpayer. So it helps a lot to just simplify that ultimately, there’s a person with a job or a little business, who has to buy something. And all of the other things that we put around, it doesn’t change the fact that there’s just one person looking at one thing at one time, and can we move that person from A to B? And beyond that, like everything else is just like layers of management on top of it? Except for our net promoter score, which is Yasmin’s like favorite ever metric for whom she is a wonderful proponent. All right. All right. That’s all I got. Awesome. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Alana. Yasmin KKC. Have a good weekend.