We Spent $68M on LinkedIn Ads: What Actually Works for B2B Lead Gen — with Garrett Mehrguth

Most founders run LinkedIn ads to get seen. Impressions, clicks, maybe some comments. But impressions don't fill your funnel, and clicks don't show up on sales calls. So the argument is, if your LinkedIn ads aren't built to book you meetings, They are built to waste your money. Our guest today has spent over $68 million testing what actually works. And today we are unpacking key elements of that system. How to target with intent and not just the titles. How to craft an offer that feels like a win to your prospect. How to match your ad type to your funnel stages and how to track what actually matters. Hey, what's going on everyone? I'm Mike Sirius and this is Mastering Tech Growth. Every week we chat with industry leaders to bring you no-fluff tips on how to grow. If you find value in the show, please do me a favor, leave us a review and drop us your biggest growth questions in the comments. You can do that as well by visiting us at masteringtechgrowth.com. Our guest today is Garrett Margoth, founder and CEO of both Directive and ABE. He bootstrapped Directive past $20 million in revenue, launched ABE to focus solely on high-performing LinkedIn ads. Helped clients like Uber, AWS, Gong, Zoom turn LinkedIn into real revenue engines, and now teaches teams how to stop wasting money and actually start booking meetings. Welcome, Gareth.

Hey, Mike. Thanks for having me.

So we'd love to kick with this one. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

I don't know if we ever mastered technological growth or, you know, how we grew. I think it's just staying curious. And you know what, because everything evolves, you know, right now there's a lot of change. User behavior is really pivoting from when, you know, I've been in marketing now for 12 years roughly.

Yep.

And just the way consumers consume information is crazy. You know, when I started, you would— a big way to grow your agency would be like guest posting. You know, you might have a column in Marketing Land or Search Engine Land. You might write for the Moz blog.

Yep.

Or, you know, whatever that is in the performance marketing category. Nobody reads blogs anymore. Most of those sites are owned by SEMrush or a private equity group. But, you know, the whole world's changed with information consumption. And so I don't know if we ever master anything. I think the key is just staying curious, okay, so you can evolve, um, what you're doing and what you're focusing your time, capital, resources, people upon to unlock growth.

Okay.

You know, you gotta stay dynamic.

I love that. Stay curious, keep evolving. So if I would rephrase this, Garrett, then I would say from all the factors that influence a business growth, and you know, you've been successful with couple of them, what do you think is the number one?

I mean, I think everything has a moment in time. I'd say in general it comes down to positioning and pricing. I think a lot of times we complicate things But most of the reasons our organizations or companies aren't growing as fast as we want is that the people that we're trying to sell our product or service to don't believe we are as valuable as we think we are. And through that, you usually have to fix that, and it's first principle for your marketing to work. But I think we have this idea that you can promote a car that only has 3 wheels and the reason it's not working is because your TV ad wasn't good enough, but it's just a crappy car.

Okay, so all right, so it means it doesn't, it doesn't matter what type of ad you run, it doesn't matter what type of offer you craft. I mean, ultimately, if there's— if the perceived value of, of, of your clients is just not there, you're just like, you're not just going to be successful. Is that what we're saying?

Yeah, I think that's something you realize as you become more mature as an entrepreneur or as a marketer or as an executive is you got to stay very humble because you realize that a lot of your success as a marketer is just because successful brands, um, you earn their trust. So when I do the marketing for Wiz, everything works. When I do the marketing for Gong Everything works. But if you're a new startup that doesn't have product market fit and hasn't figured out your pricing mechanisms and struggles with customer support and uptime, and you're still nascent or naive in your journey—

yep.

And I'm trying to market Gang.io and Waz.ai. The same campaigns that worked amazing for Wiz and Gong don't work that well for Gang and Waz.

Okay.

And so I think what you have to learn is just time and place. And how to look at the first principles of a product or a service and make sure that you have hard conversations. If you're an internal employee with the ownership, and if you're an external vendor, you have to have hard conversations that say, hey, before we're going to be effective, I think we need to get, you know, X, Y, and Z in order for us to really scale. You know, because all, you know, you'll hear this a lot as a marketer You hear, you know, once we see results, you know, we're gonna triple down, there's no budget. Oh, once we see— I've been doing this for 12 years, there ain't nobody who saw results and tripled down in 12 years. Not one person. It's all BS. Yeah, there's this naivety of people who haven't done it at the highest level who say, okay, you know, our founders are really aggressive, or our owners are really bought in, and, you know, once we see results, we're going to spend more. But It's kind of like building a paper, you know, an airplane out of cardboard. And what I mean by that is sometimes people's budgets and commitments are so minuscule and that they never had a chance, okay, to be successful. And I think those are the conversations you have to push back on, on the hardest, you know. So someone comes to me and says, hey, I want to do LinkedIn ads, but I only have $5K a month to spend.

That's not good.

Okay, well then you probably shouldn't do LinkedIn ads because you might come to a false conclusion that the LinkedIn ads don't work, but I'd argue that your budget was so small you never had a chance to learn and evolve and get it to work.

Mm-hmm. What's a decent budget then for LinkedIn campaigns? What's a minimum in your mind where you can expect to do that campaign properly?

Yeah, I think there's two minimums. I think the minimum is first the agency fee. I don't think you can pay an agency a freelancer or an employee less than $5K a month to manage it. Um, if you think about that, that's $60,000.

Yep.

Right, that's a year. Yep. That's not the price of someone who has deep expertise or talent in anything, right? Whether that's plumbing, whether that's painting, whether that's marketing, whether that's legal.

Yeah.

So there's this idea that expertise is free. The these days. Um, but you really do get what you pay for. So I don't think when it comes to the actual expertise of managing the platform, you can spend less than $5K, and even that I think is fairly affordable. Um, and then on top of that, when it comes to media spend, I'd argue if you're serious about learning the platform, you should be spending around $10,000 a month. As your initial budget. Now, I think what the mistake people do—

yep—

is they'll take, let's say, that same $60,000 in budget, let's say media, and they'll spend $5K for 12 months. That's their plan.

Yep.

I'd argue you're better off spending $10K for 6 months and then building a business case off that experiment, and then either pausing it because it didn't work or asking for more capital from the board or from management because it did work. I think what we sometimes do though is we spread out our budgets, underinvest, and then come to incorrect conclusions around anything in marketing, not just LinkedIn.

Okay, I love that positioning. We're basically saying if you— LinkedIn in general is known to be expensive for ads, so we're saying don't even enter that space if you don't have a decent enough budget, just find another, like, other space. So are we saying that if you come in LinkedIn with a smaller budget, or just small budget in general, you're just wasting money? Like, you're not really gonna get consistent results, and it's gonna be upside down, it's gonna be just random, and you have no idea what effect you're getting from it?

Yeah, but I mean, even more than that, like, I don't know why we do this in marketing but we don't do it in anything else.

Okay.

You think you could buy a Ferrari for $30,000?

Probably very used one which barely runs. Maybe just scraps.

But you would know that going in, right? You look at the Ferrari like, this thing's beat up. This is a crappy car.

Yeah.

Still wonder how people buy a Toyota Camry and then think they're going to beat Lewis Hamilton in an F1 race.

Yeah, it's good.

And I don't know why, but it's the only thing. It's like you can't get a roof for $5,000. You can't get a plumber for $50. Okay, you can't buy a new computer for $100. Yeah, you can't get a new like iPhone for $50. And we know this, but then when it comes to marketing, we think that marketers are somehow magicians.

Yeah, I—

that they can do some, you know, thing and we'll go viral, or, you know, we're gonna see some— once we get ROI, we're gonna double down. But you're so underinvested that you're using a Sharpie marker to paint your room black.

I love that.

You know, it's not real paint and you're not doing it right. You didn't prep the walls, you didn't use primer, and you just did a crappy job painting. And now you go around your life accusing everyone that painters are bad and that you can't find any good painters, but you just tried to paint a room with a Sharpie.

Yeah, you pay what you get for. I mean, that's pretty much the conclusion we're making over here. You can't pay minimum and expect maximum. It's just the life doesn't work like that. And it applies probably to every industry.

Yeah, but I just think that the testing budget idea is just so flawed. And I see it every day because I still do so many sales calls, you know? And we have more than $100 million in spend on LinkedIn, you know? And I do this every day with, some of the biggest advertisers on the platform, and frankly, some of the smallest. And what I always try to tell is the people who are just starting out, I said, hey, just make sure you go into this with eyes wide open and that you give the platform and the, the vendor a fair chance to be successful. And if not, you know, I don't need to take your money. Let's just wait a little bit, or let's try to front load the budget or come up with different terms. But I'm not in the business of just saying yes to everybody and then them thinking that LinkedIn doesn't work or my company's poor. And I think you have to be— have a spine, you know, as a— as an agency or as a freelancer, as a vendor, where you don't just take people's money but you're honest with someone, say, hey, you know, I don't think we have the proper budget, timeline, or expectations going into this initiative, uh, and I don't know if we're a good fit for it unless we're a little bit more serious about how long it takes, how how expensive. Yeah, I want to call it platform expensive. I call it valuable. It's targeted. How targeted and valuable the platform is, and then what we should probably be spending. And the reason you want to spend is not so I make more money. I don't make any additional money if you spend $10K or $2K or $15K. In fact, I have to do more work. I make less money if you spend more. Yeah, but the reason I want you to spend more is I don't want your ads to stop. Like, I don't want to Throughout the day, if you're running sponsored content, for example, you might run out of budget on your daily budgets so you can spread your money out for the month. And when you do that, your CPMs and your CPLs, so your cost per impression, your cost per click, and your cost per lead, all those go up really drastically if you don't have enough budget to let the campaigns run. We're in this new algorithmic advertising environment where we need enough budget for the campaigns to stay on. But if the campaigns are constantly pausing due to budget, it gets really tricky on delivery and the platform starts to deprioritize you, starts to charge you more. And I would argue that you, you are now in an inflated cost environment from being cheap. And so you want to spend as little as you can, which I respect, but you can't spend so little that your ads don't have a chance to operate and learn from and evolve. So you need to be nuanced.

Okay. All right. So let's say I'm coming into this. I got a service or SaaS platform, you know, whatever I'm trying to get my sales calls for and meetings for. I'm coming with this with, well, effectively $200,000, right? So I got $60,000 for the $5K a month advertiser who's going to run all of that. I got $10K a month budget. So that's $160,000. So it's around like $200,000 a year, right?

So I'm coming in with this.

The first thing I I do is I need to understand the targeting, right? So what is my total addressable market? You advocate for intent-driven, as in, you know, find customers which have intents rather than just going after the titles like VC.

No, I can't figure out intent. Everybody lies about that.

Okay, well, everybody's like, I'm gonna use Bombora data and all this kind of—

it's all joke. It's a joke. It's informational intent masquerading as commercial intent.

Okay.

So the way intent data works for most people today is they are essentially being told that a topic or an idea that they care about is surging, let's say. And what it really means is that Bombora owns a bunch of crappy media sites that they put their pixel on, and someone searches how to do keyword research, and they say that they're in the market for an SEO agency.

Okay, I see what you mean.

So I have not found that intent data, which is almost all powered by Bombora's API, not the vendor that you're buying it from, is predicated on informational intent queries that they then sell to you as commercial intent, which then ironically misappropriates your resources, capital, and energy. So what I do instead is, um, simple but thorough and based on first principles. It's how I advertise my money. You know, Directive for years was spending over $275,000 a month on that. LinkedIn ads. So I personally spent millions on the platform of my own money, and I bootstrapped my business. So when I advise people on things, I like to do it from a place of like, I'm in the game, I'm in the arena with you. You know, we started as an SEO shop 12 years ago, and I ranked number 1 globally for SEO agency. I was doing my own SEO. Now we're the one of the largest LinkedIn advertisers in the world, and I spend a lot on LinkedIn. Because I wanna know what works or what doesn't. And the way I start every audience is the same. I look at the kind of first-party data of my customers or of my clients' customers. I'm SOC 2 compliant, so we're able to work with a lot of cybersecurity vendors and people who have, you know, intense data environments. And what we look at is we get an anonymized list of their accounts that we enrich. And from that enrichment, we're essentially running a regression analysis. And what we're looking at— what makes a customer have maybe the highest average contract value, highest ACV, highest win rate, largest lifetime value, lowest CAC, quickest payback period— whatever that financial KPI that your CFO and your management and your board are optimizing for. right? We, we create alignment with that, and then we build a regression analysis to figure out what independent variables are statistically significant, have high t-stats or, you know, high confidence intervals against a dependent variable. So like, for Directive, I want someone who is advertising at least $50,000 a month on ads. If they're advertising that, I know that they will hit my min pricing and I don't have to downsell them to my startups offering. I have a lovely $5K month-to-month service that's great. It's profitable for me, it's effective for organizations that don't have huge capital. And we do that, we make a lot of money on that. It's grown for us, our clients are very happy with it. It's a great offering. But if I'm gonna go spend my money, just like you spending yours, I wanna go get larger contracts, bigger engagements, and I wanna invest my capital upmarket. And so what I look at is I take all my current clients and I know what they're spending on LinkedIn, I know what they're spending on Google, I know what they're spending on programmatic, I know what they're spending on Meta or whatever channel, and I put all that data in there. And then I enrich them with ZoomInfo, who we've done the ads for and I think does have the best products for data. Okay, and then I run a regression analysis. I used to have to do this really slow, and now we get to use our AI platform that we built internally called Stratos. And Stratos has operators that we've created that can build this logic and do this analysis on our behalf as consultants. And so with Stratos, what I'm doing is I tell Stratos, I say, tell me what makes these companies, based on their private info— I know privately they're spending this month much— how much, what public available information is statistically correlated to that ad spend of greater than $50K? and that then builds this operator for me. So I find out they have X amount of headcount in their marketing department, they're using Y technology, they have Z amount of total headcount, um, they have this many people in their marketing department, maybe whatever that is, right? And then I use the SEMrush and the SpyFu API, and as long as the SEMrush and SpyFu are saying that this amount, then in general with all this information, we're 95% confident that this company, if all these publicly available traits are true, is spending more than $50K, which is unknown. I then use that and I say, okay, find me every company who has those character traits, and that becomes my TAM. And now I advertise to people that are spending more than $50K a month on ads, even though I don't know their budget.

Okay.

I do that for everybody. So every company is unique like that, where they have something. For me, it's $50K in ad spend. For you, it might be that you're an Autodesk customer. For someone else, it might be that they're using this cybersecurity product. For someone else, it might be that they have Kubernetes or whatever this is. Every company has something. Maybe it's a multi-location, so they have to have over 10 locations. I try to figure out what this kind of statistically significant variable is. Prove it out and then find every company in the regions they operate globally that shares those traits.

That's a very sophisticated and high-level process, Garrett. So I'm just thinking like, you know, that's why you use companies like you. That's why you use companies who have skin in the field, spend a lot of and have those tools to really just get the most value of the agency spend they have. Let's imagine—

Well, I do it like it's my money, right? If I'm going to spend my money, This is how I would spend my money, which is I only wanna go after accounts that fit my ideal customer persona, that I can monetize at a proper average contract value, that my sales team has signed off on. That's the other part. We have the sales organization of our client sign off and say, "We want to win these accounts," because we need to integrate the two business units, the teams. We are a team, sales and marketing together alongside product, trying to convince, ecosystem or community that we're the best option and we're valuable versus our cost.

How do I backwards engineer this? If I'm a founder, I'm listening right now and I'm like, you know what, you know, I'm not gonna pay you $5K, I just want to do the most minimum I can with the tools available. Like, is there a, like, a tip you would give to someone to do some of the wins you're getting with this process? It's like, because effectively you're saying don't use the you know, the tools which tells you the, the commercial intent. You be— you're saying this is not the best approach, right? So if someone wants to do a little bit of backwards engineering of what you do, like, is that even possible?

Yeah, it's totally possible. I mean, I can learn how to fix cars. I watch YouTube videos and do it all day. Should I teach myself to be a mechanic?

Yeah.

Am I very good at it?

Exactly.

And so I think if you're founder who wants to be cheap, there's nothing more expensive.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

But if you want to do it yourself, which I did when I started, and I'm not against doing things myself, what I would do is I would use an AI product like ChatGPT or Claude or Relevance, and I would build a model, uh, that would allow me to figure out what publicly available traits are indicative of private data that I know about my customers. So I could find other companies that have that type of public data that would mean they have the, the kind of dependent variable I'm requiring. But you can do that, you know, ChatGPT and these products today can all run a regression analysis. So if you do a little economic research and you understand how to run a regression analysis all you have to do is write the prompt and upload the spreadsheet, and, you know, it's making sense. The data— I, I can run a regression analysis off of a TAM file from a client and have it all done in 15 minutes. It's not— okay, um, the, the real wisdom is being mature enough and sophisticated enough and disciplined enough to then go through the data yourself and revalidate it understand it, ask yourself, how are you going to route this? How do you get someone on LinkedIn who's scrolling to get from apathy to action? And how do you make sure that sales knows how to pitch you in this kind of outbound way versus an inbound referral or something? And the actual monetization of the methodology is where the real grit and talent is described. I would argue founders shouldn't be worried about list building and media buying, and they should probably spend $60,000 a least to have someone do it for them so they can create more leverage on their time.

Okay, so let's say you have—

I've never bought the media, you know, I've never ran a LinkedIn campaign myself. I obsess about the things that the media buyer might not— the methodology, the logic, the, the analysis, the how we think about the first principles of advertising. That's what I obsess on. But I don't worry about the fact they're find myself insecure about the fact that I don't know how to do bids or set up the campaigns. I have people in my life that I train and employ that are far better at that. I focus more on why something works and how to process something that's complex and tricky.

Okay. How often would you refresh that list? Like, let's say I build that one, I launched the campaigns, Like, depends on the cycle, right?

So let's say I was selling only into AI companies, I'd probably refresh the list quarterly because so many are getting acquired, folding, growing. Yeah, entering. Now if I sell law firms, maybe only every 6 months, maybe once a year, you know. So just depends on who your audience is and the velocity of their kind of incumbents and acquisitions and consolidations. So it just depends on stability or instability of the audience you serve.

What's your opinion on sort of aligning your ads with like a single persona? I think it lowers the cost per lead, right? But like in real terms, like how much more admin work or research work or just execution work we're adding if we want to just You know, tied again.

That's how clever you are. Okay, like anything. So like, I'll give you an example of what I used to do and what someone could do. I don't recommend it, um, because I don't agree with the economics of it. So most people are still promoting assets and informational content on LinkedIn via ads that they themselves wouldn't read And if they did read, would probably be less likely to hire the company who wrote it than they were before they read it. That's the biggest problem in marketing today, is marketers create content and promote things that they themselves are uninspired by, don't enjoy, and sometimes we lose our soul. In other words, we're not doing marketing we soulfully believe in and love. Instead, we're going through the motions of checking the box of, okay, I gotta have an ebook, and then I gotta have a white paper, and then I gotta do this. But it— the, the creativity, the memorability, the like, the excitement, we sometimes miss that, if that makes sense. So first, I would challenge the concept that the content you are creating is so compelling that if someone were to read it, they would actually want to hire you. I think that's important, number one. But what people do is they take these assets and they promote them. And so one of the ways you could personify it, and that I have personified it and gotten over 70% conversion rates on my lead gen form, so you take a guide, let's say The Ultimate Guide to Demand Generation, okay? It has a nice kind of creative and it's the ebook. And then I personify it to the titles. So I make that now The CMO's Guide to Demand Generation. I now advertise it exclusively to CMOs. Yeah, I changed the creative to say CMO instead of The Ultimate Guide to Demand. Just as The Ultimate Guide, you know, it says— instead of The Ultimate Guide, says The CMO's Guide to Demand Generation. And then do that with the VP, I do that with the director, I do that with the manager. So now I have 4 titles, all with one asset that just has 4 different covers and 4 different creatives and 4 different copies. But it's all frankly the same, it just changes out the title and it calls them out. That works exceptionally well. However, that lead, even at 70% conversion rates, is an informational intent lead. So then what I call that is like you're using LinkedIn as the most expensive content syndication platform in the the world. And then you send that lead to an SDR. I love them to death, but you got some 22-year-old who doesn't know what the hell they're doing, who then is emailing and calling them a bunch. And this human is not able to get from this apathetic informational state to this active commercial state. And if you think about LinkedIn outside of your cost per lead, which is a— I would say an immature way to look at the platform and instead look at your cost per demo and your cost per customer and your cost per intro call held— real moments of value where you're pitching your product to someone— those types of campaigns have very low CPLs but comically high cost per demos, cost per customers, cost per intro calls. So you're really not—

you shouldn't allocate much of your capital to these informational assets on So let me ask this because that feels to me like a top of the funnel, right? So you just sort of—

That's the middle in my mind.

That's the middle. So what would be like if we talk about LinkedIn ads and they have multiple types and sort of try to match this against the funnel. So what would be like, what's at the top then if that's in the middle?

Video. It's what works the best on the product, right? You're going to have very low cost per impression bidding. And you can leverage it. Now, the key to doing this, okay, is you want to use a 15-second video, okay? So most people are still using 30-second or longer videos when advertising on—

15 seconds, so that's 1:5.

1:5, okay. The reason being is that— so I like have all the data on this because I'm doing this with my new startup, Abe, right? I'm spending around $35,000 to $30,000 to $25,000, kind of depending on the month on the platform. Never less than $25,000, no more than $35,000, roughly. I've spent like up to $50,000 some months, but, you know, it's a new agency. I think we'll break even this month, so it's pretty exciting. We launched in March with 9 full-time people, pre-revenue, um, and bet on ourselves, and it's gone great. But as a LinkedIn ad agency, we are spending our bootstrapped capital, and frankly you know, we're kind of self-funded, so we've been spending more than we've been making in profit on ads and making sure that, you know, we're eating our own caviar, let's say. Now, what we've noticed is we've run 3 different types of targeting tests, and I'll kind of walk through all 3, and then I'll show you why that ties back to why the 15-second video is so important. So when we set up a campaign, there's a few ways to do it. One is called a contact-based TAM. So that means you take that same TAM that you built of all the companies, but then you enrich it and you actually upload the contacts. That was resulting in a $600 CPL for us. Conversely, uploading the companies and then targeting the titles that we service had a $300 CPL. Okay, 3-something, you know. But then all the way down at $100 $1 CPL was retargeting.

Yeah.

Now the reason I tell you this is because it goes back to the video and what you need to do atop a funnel. You build a retargeting audience when someone watches 25% of your video. Hmm. So the shorter you make a video, the less time someone has to watch before being triggered in your retargeting pool at a cheaper cost per bid. Okay, so by doing a 15-second video, the volume of people who get to the 25-second mark drastically increases. And then you use those people to send conversation ads and other direct response advertising to, to try to get a human directly to a sales meeting, not an asset download on the platform. But you can't scale by just doing retargeting because you're limited by your audience size. And so when you initially launch a campaign, it might be more expensive, which goes to why you need time and budget, where it's like 75% of the budget is going to bottom of funnel and 25% is going to top, nothing to the middle. And then over time, you can start to spend 75% on the top and 25% on the cold bottom because your retargeting lists are getting so big that it's able to satisfy your budget.

Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense. What's in the 25% of the 15 seconds? So you got, Is it like 1/4, like less than 5 seconds of that video for someone to watch to get in the pool, right? What are you actually saying in that 5 first seconds? I'm just interested.

You could argue it doesn't matter. You could argue that just simply bidding against the retargeting audience has such a lower CPM that it doesn't matter at all. Or you could say, hey, how do I get their attention in 5 seconds? Which is a good thing. But if you zoom out of the first principles of the concept, all you're doing is getting a 300% lower cost per send.

Yeah. But then you still want to get them in the meeting and if they actually didn't watch the video, didn't like, you're still putting them.

Yeah, but I mean, your number one performing campaigns are the cold traffic still. They never seen the video.

Okay.

Remember, if you think about it, 75% of your budget when you launch is going to cold traffic and those things are still converting.

Okay, that's a very nice one. Thanks for that. So that's the top—

lie to yourself and say, I'm gonna change their opinion in 5 seconds, and it's not a bad goal to set.

I love that.

Or you could zoom out and say, mechanically, I have a 300% cheaper cost per send of a conversation ad if it's a retargeted visitor versus a cold one. And the point should just be to increase the amount of people that I can retarget to, to thus lower my cost per customer.

I love that hook. I'm gonna change your opinion in 5 seconds. That's a good, good starting for a video, right? So that's a top of the funnel. I mean, that's a very great tip, Gary. That's, I'm sure people listening enjoying, especially the ones who actually understand how to play this, right? So because it's, it is an advanced, but that's why, you know, you extracted so much value of it. So, um, so video ads, great for the top funnel. You said, uh, affected the lead form, which was the content-driven ebook lead form. That, that's the middle, right? I mean, there's, there's more LinkedIn ad types, you know, like conversational ones, where in your mind did this one sit? The conversation ads?

That's the bottom. Yeah, it's the bottom.

That's the bottom, right?

Yeah, what you can do there is, I mean, so like I got lucky with kind of how I created all this. So, you know, Directive, my agency, like myself, are the pioneers of gift giving for a demo. So if you go back pre-COVID, We were kind of just entering SaaS as a category. We'd been a B2B shop. We were at roughly $4 to $6 million in top-line revenue, and we were working with good brands. Like, we had the Sendoso account, you know, some big names in SaaS. And, um, Sendoso, we also were a customer of theirs, and my head of marketing Uh, she was a super talented gal, um, and she's no longer with us, but she's working in SaaS with some really big vendors as their head of marketing. And she was great for us, and— but she forgot something. She made a mistake. She didn't realize that the Sendoso contract was up on Friday. It was like a Tuesday like this, and, um, the credits didn't roll over, so we had to spend $16,000 in a few days. Right, or else we could lose those gifting credits.

Yeah.

So she came up with the idea to give people a $100 gift card in exchange for taking a sales meeting with us, and that we would distribute that on a conversation ad and test it against our SDRs. So at the time I had 5 SDRs and they were doing your normal outreach playbook. I had Outreach as a client at the time as well. I mean, we've been doing this a while, right? And so we had Outreach.io, and, you know, we're also using their product because I've been using it for like 10 years already. And you have your SDRs, and they're struggling with open rates, they're struggling with response rates, they're struggling with pickup rates. I mean, I had Connect and Sell, I had big lists, I had full-time sales ops person, we were running sequences. This is a real SDR team with the head of sales development at the time too, and we were just getting our butt kicked. And so we do everything on LTV CAC modeling where we evaluate our investments by channel every month. And so what we did is we took our SDR team and then we compared them against conversation ads. Well, with those conversation ads where we were offering a gift card for a sales meeting, we had 10,000 accounts. We held sales calls with 6,800 of our 10,000 accounts in 18 months and grew the business to over $23 million. Okay, just off of gift cards for a meeting.

How many of these you actually closed to this day?

How—

what's the close rate on that? So, so you got 10,000, 1,600, uh, and just purely offering the gift card, and then out of these 1,600, like, you know, they came on 800 out of the 10,000. 68. All right, that's on a real market share. Yeah, no, that's, that's huge. Okay. So what happens then? You know, you got them on a call, you gave them the, you know, the gift. They're there. They're like, thanks for the gift. Bye.

Or 8-person sales org as a professional service provider.

Yeah.

So you have a lot of meetings. We were doing 12 to 18 intro calls a day.

Yep.

And then I have 4 full-time recruiters so I can hire strategists. I still have all these like infrastructure. Yep. That's how you kind of sustain your success as an agency is you have to You're like a marketplace, right? So you have to create demand for your services, but you also have to be consistently investing in supply of talent for delivery, right?

Exactly.

And so, no, I mean, the campaigns work. They still work to this day. Um, the close rate was terrible though at first. And I think this is what goes back to my point before of like when founders and entrepreneurs— everybody loves to lie to themselves. Nothing in marketing works right away, and everything is hard as hell. Okay, for 6 months we didn't win one of these deals. And I never stopped. I never cut spend and I never gave up. Okay, I just kept getting closer because I knew it could work. Because think about the first principles of marketing. The first principle of marketing is that I want the right person from the right company to be so interested in my service that they hear my pitch. Yeah, that is why we do it. So if you were to ask someone, say, would you pay $100 for the VP of marketing at Calendly to take a sales call with you? Yeah, every logical human in the world would say yes. They'd pay actually a lot more than $100 if their business allowed. Maybe they pay $2,000, $1,100, $800. So if you think about the methodology and its principles, and we call our approach to advertising customer generation So the first principle is that you have your total addressable market, right? So if I know I'm advertising to the right person at the right accounts and sales has signed off on my list, and then I do my financial modeling where I know how much I can spend for an intro call based on my LTV/CAC ratio, now I can be aggressive. So for 6 months I didn't give up because I was talking to the right person at the right account, but I didn't have the sales process for it. You know, my AEs You didn't know how to get from talking to someone who just wanted a gift card to making them want our services.

Yeah.

And then there was so much volume that you couldn't even use AEs, you had to use SDRs. So how do you teach an SDR, you know, this 25, 23-year-old kid who's now talking to a 45-year-old VP about a $350,000 contract, right? How do you design the sales process? And so it took 6 months of me hopping on calls myself, talking, doing the intro calls, figuring out what the script was. If I wanted to use a deck, do I not use a deck? What happens after the intro call? Does it go straight to proposal? Do we do another call? Who should be on that call? Do we get operations involved? And if you get really close to it, you can monetize it and it becomes amazing. There's no magic bullets in life, you know?

So what was that process like? Just to keep pillars, what happens? You're on a call, you have the conversation, what—

Yeah, I mean, I think you have to attack the gift card conversation with directness.

Okay.

So I would do something like this, and this became our script. I'd say, "Hey Mike, my name's Garrett. Love to chat with you. I saw you engage with some of our marketing campaigns. Looks like it really resonated with you." Yeah. "Now I wanna just get this out here. You came from a gift card campaign. Obviously you're wildly successful and you do well financially, so you don't need the $100." What made you prioritize this meeting in your busy day?

I just want a $100 gift card and maybe I want to listen what you guys selling because I'm interested to hear your pitch and, you know, maybe I'll learn something.

Yeah, no one admits the first part though because when you frame it like that, they would be very cheap and abusive to say that. Okay, so no one, no one in a way that makes them realize, yeah, that they have to authentically listen, right?

Okay, so it's sort of like no one wants to say that they came here for the, for the gift card because, okay, it just sounds bad, you know, you're cheap. So you— okay, I get it.

Yep, no one wants to admit that they can be bought for $100.

Yeah, okay, that's nice.

So then you— so you directly address it. And then once you've gotten that out of the way, you're now two humans talking about Mike's opportunities and problems.

Right. Okay. So it becomes a proper sales call. You're looking to understand really what he's struggling with and where you can actually bring value.

And if you don't do that, the guy's on his phone the whole time. When the fuck do I get my good— whatever that is. But if you do it authentically and you say directly like, hey Mike, Obviously you're wildly successful and do well financially. You don't need $100.

Yeah.

What made you prioritize taking this call on your busy day? And now you have to give me something. You go, well, you know, we have an agency, but, you know, I feel like they're kind of running out of ideas. Okay.

Yeah.

Well, what ideas do you wish they would pitch you? Yeah. And now you do a real proper discovery, and then from there you set up a strategy call where That's usually where I would show up and maybe the director of the service we're selling would show up. And then from there we do a full pitch with an audit. And from there we do an SOW. You know, you have a proper sales process. But you know, that methodology works, yeah.

You're still using that to this day?

Yeah, 7 years later, yeah.

Okay, so what's the close rate? Like, you know, from these 6, 6, 6,800s, goes in the calls. Initially you said you didn't close a single one.

Yeah, 30%. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. That's quite nice. So people, okay. So it's almost like if you would compare this to like an actually getting a sales call through ads, how does the gift giving compares, you know, on a cost basis, you know, with other styles of campaigns?

The other campaigns all work more efficiently and better, but they struggle with volume.

So this is the easiest way to actually just get volume into calls. So effectively—

Well, yeah, because it's a little tricky. So there's more nuance, right? So once again, you have to zoom out and think about the first principles, right? So in advertising, you have search. Search has intent, but no firmographics. And so if you're a marketer or an entrepreneur or a leader, and you're saying, I wanna move up market, or I want to target this individual audience. The second you take a search campaign which is designed to be broad and you make it specific, the costs go up and the volume goes down, and it becomes a valuable channel but not a scalable channel. So ClickUp, Monday, Asana, Slack— product-led growth software tech companies— they can crush on search. They have $8 per user pricing. Bottom-up sales strategy that they're very good at search from a product fit to the channel. Now conversely, social has firmographics but no intent. So what I'm doing is instead of trying to optimize for acquisition, which I don't believe is wise in an auction-based environment because there's still a floor for how low you can get a CPM or CPC, I optimize for activation. So what I'm saying is, how do I manufacture intent? And it— that it's actually factually, scientifically, mathematically cheaper to pay someone to attend an intro call than to not pay them, because you can't manufacture intent without the monetary incentive. And so the cost per intro call held is prohibitive on social channels for B2B if you don't use an incentive because you're not able to get someone to a sales moment often enough because they're not having intent. So you manufacture intent.

Okay. Does it ever come up if you, like, once you start closing, do people go like, how did I just sort of walked in this room? Like, you waved like a gift card and now I'm signing this big contract. Do people ever sort of bring that up? Like, that was so cool or any sort of feedback? Yeah, it depends.

You know, like I won the CMO of Calendly with a $250 Amazon gift card on Instagram.

Okay. To tell us that story, like, like some of the campaigns.

Yep. He took the meeting. Uh-huh. Liked us. Now we're the market leader. I am the biggest software marketing agency in the world and it's not close. That helps.

Yes, right.

Everything helps, like I was saying in the very beginning.

Yeah.

If you have a track record of success and you have a certain energy and confidence that you've hopefully earned, and you have a methodology and you have case studies and you have track records, you know, if a software company comes to us today, we've probably worked with the number one player in their category who they want to be.

Yep. You know, so for them, for them it might be just like, hey, uh, I'm looking for agency like that, so I'm interested in the ways you getting calls. And if you're doing this campaign, you're offering me money, you know, like gift card. You're right, I don't need that, but I just want to see where that's actually going to lead. I'm already in the need, right? So I'm already—

yeah, we evoke jealousy. So I think what I try to teach everyone is every, every, uh, persona, you should have an emotion you're trying to evoke. So when I market to marketers, I try to make the marketer jealous of my marketing because it creates a subconscious moment in their mind that these people are great at their craft and will do clever, good marketing for me like they, like they marketed to me with. And so the best way to get a customer as a marketing agency is to do great marketing. Does that make sense?

It does make perfect sense. I love that. I'm just feeling like, you know, a couple of times I got like these, not ads on internet, but I got, you know, the LinkedIn message ads where it literally had that approach where it was offering me, you know, a gift to take a call, like an Amazon gift card. I never engaged with that.

How much was the card though? So there's a—

It was, one was like $25 and another was $100.

It has to be over $100.

It has to be over $100. Why it has to be over $100?

I don't know. I don't make the rules of humanity.

So people just go like, okay, well, if it's about $100, it's worth my time or something like that.

Yeah. I mean, I tested it. I'd like to give them a lower one, Mike, if I could, right?

Just take $2.

Right. I mean, you think about my goals. I would like to pay you as little as possible to take the meeting.

Yeah, I get you.

But at some point it becomes more expensive to be cheap, like we talked about in the beginning.

Yeah.

In other words, my cost per intro call held goes up if I do less than $100, not down.

Okay, so you always go $100, or do you play with like $160, $250, $300, and just see where that—

I did the $200 thing, like I got, you know, the Calendly guy, but the problem is it works too well. And now, you know, the bad side of our humanity is being motivated or unlocked. And so you're always trying to find an amount or something that's enticing enough that you're willing to take the call, but not so enticing that you're willing to take the call when you have zero interest at all.

Yeah.

Okay, you want someone who's got like at least 25% interest, let's say.

You had a post where you talked about targeting, um, the VPs, the heads, you know, the management rather than CEOs and the founders. I think it was about the fact that they move the budgets and they actually have more interest, you know, to buy into services than the founders and CEOs. Is that still the opinion you hold? And, you know, do you have any numbers to sort of support that targeting?

Yeah.

Yep.

I think I've got common sense. I think common sense is better than numbers.

How low do you go? Like, you know, like, what's the, you know, lowest?

Yeah, so the first is like the saying. So I like to start with sayings because I think they help people like codify an idea. So the, the saying is champions are greater than decision makers. So if I do 10 sales calls to talk with a marketing leader about how they want to approach you know, their ICP and their titles and their persona. 8 out of 10 is gonna say they want to target someone in the C-suite. Yeah, I, I think it's the most unwise, silly thing we do. First off, one of the reasons that person got all the way promoted to the C-level exec is because they don't allow themselves to get stained with risky decisions. So think about the nature of top performers in corporate environments. Right? These are not owners, they're not partners. What they're amazing at is building relationships and playing the game. They're also usually decently talented at the thing they do, but there are things that they're usually best at— it's managing others, playing the game, communicating upward, being politically wise, and they're usually decent at marketing. But they usually don't become CMO because they're the best at marketing. Same with CFO, same with CEO. We're good at the game we're playing more so than we are at any technical skill or craft. And one of the things we've learned, and that's helped us get promoted, is we don't associate ourselves with decisions that have too much risk. It's bad for our brand internally. So one thing that CMOs never really do is choose external vendors that their team then has to work with on a daily basis and manage. It's unwise. Number one, if they push the decision down, the person who's managing the relationship in the day-to-day may not be fully bought in. And number two, most agencies suck, and if you get it wrong, you gotta explain to the board why you need a new agency 6 months later because you hired the wrong one. So you don't make those decisions. In fact, in 12 years of doing this, we very rarely interact with CMOs. I wish we interacted more, but they try to stay out of the performance marketing conversations and push that to the director of demand gen and their VP of marketing. And they manage more of the internal politics, the strategy, the direction, and they delegate to their team, which is wise of them. The same goes for everything, brother. The CFO isn't, you know, picking the— this— the CMO isn't picking that, the CTO isn't picking this. They're pushing things to the directors and their VPs who then make decisions about third-party tools or third-party vendors to work with. And so when you advertise, if you advertise the C-suite, number one, they're going to be a much more expensive persona with higher cost per impressions. Because LinkedIn isn't like search. In search, you're only competing with other brands that are advertising on that query. In social, you're competing with every company in the world that's advertising to a part of that human. You might be advertising the CMO part. Some other person might be advertising to the household income part of them. Another company might be advertising to their age. Another company might be advertising to their activity online. Another person might be advertising to them to their hobbies. A person has so many characteristics to them that are all advertisable that certain humans are more expensive than others. And so the further you go down the hierarchy of an organization, the cheaper it is to advertise them. And so then what you have to do is realize your cutoffs. So for example, I never advertise to managers at companies that have more than 500 employees because now they're too far away from the buying process, and that person really will take a meeting for $100 and has no ability to buy. It's not that they might not have a desire to work with an agency, it's that they have no power to advocate for one or even introduce you to someone who does. Yeah, they're too low. Yeah, so we try to put most of our capital at the director and VP level. That makes sense.

It makes perfect sense. So, so effectively, this is just, um, how you would phrase this is like first principle thing. You mentioned that a couple of times, or it's just like generic logic, like this is the, this is the level you should be targeting, or is that actually worked for anyone, you know?

So I never was taught the like best practices. I just kind of look at everything and I go Yeah, I wonder if that makes sense. What have I experienced? Yeah, what if— would I— do I do it like that? And if you kind of get outside of yourself and you look at your thinking and why you're doing things, you're very critical about yourself, and you critique why you do what you do and if it worked and why did it work, why did it not work. Am I doing this just because everyone else does it, or am I doing this because I think it could work logically off of first principles? And if you kind of keep everything very simple, you start to become good at whatever it is you're doing, whether it's fishing or marketing or finance or accounting.

Yeah, I love that. All right, so let's touch a little bit on the metrics you like, Gareth. So I remember reading your post where you went like, if you don't tracking the whole pipeline, which goes from the ads to the calendar to CRM, you know, just don't run ads, you know, you're wasting money basically. Like, do you still hold that opinion as well? Why is it so important to actually track the whole pipeline through?

It just depends on like, you know, how serious you are, right? So let's say you're a plumber, right? Because that's where I started was helping plumbers. I charged them $200 a month and I, you know, do their ads, their website, their SEO. I started on Fiverr even before that for $5. So I kind of started very humbly and at the very bottom just working. Trying to get people results and trying to turn every client into a case study. So let's say you're a plumber. You could buy CallRail or some type of call tracking software, or you could just realize you used to get 2 calls a day and now you're getting 6, so something's working.

Yeah.

And you're not running so many different campaigns that you wonder— it's like, yeah, I just hired this new young kid Garrett who's like 23 years old he's doing digital stuff for you, so that digital stuff must be working. And even if it worked really, really well, you couldn't really invest that much more because you only have so much labor, and you know, this— you're not wired that way, right? Now let's say you're Wiz or you're Gong or AWS or you're Dropbox, and you're investing tens of hundreds of millions of dollars into your growth. Well, if you're them, I do think it makes sense to know what's working within your CRM, not just within your ad platforms. So most marketers still today are stuck on this kind of reporting on leads, even in 2025, where it's like, you know, we drove this many leads or this many MQLs. No one should be doing that. The, the— you should always try, as a marketer, when it comes to your marketing KPI, which I call like a marketing KPI, it should be your highest volume but also statistically most statistically significant correlation to ACV and win rate moment in your pipeline. So for many, that's demo. They know when they give a demo, on average they win 35% of them at a $42,000 ACV or whatever that is. Now you know if you get 40 demos, you get Y amount of bookings and you hit your forecast. And now you can port that data of demos back into LinkedIn, back into Meta back into Google and you can say, hey, ad auction platform, optimize for this, right? So you need enough volume for the platforms to optimize, but also enough significance that they're optimizing for will result in closed one bookings at a later date. So you want your marketing KPI to be in there no earlier than sales qualified lead, no later than demo. In my mind, is that like initial marketing KPI? But then when you're reporting upward into management, you should be talking about market share You should be talking about volume of demos, cost per demos, and then you should be talking about closed won, ACV, and close rate. And as long as you're staying focused on lifecycle conversion rates and cost per lifecycle stage, I'd say you're a mature marketer who is looking to be a steward of the organization's capital. And we do that in all our reporting for our customers. We report on everything through lifetime value against customer acquisition costs and life cycle stage conversion rates and cost per life cycle stage by channel and by ad unit and by campaign for every engagement.

So effectively—

And that's how you should be thinking about it.

Yeah, so effectively we're saying, I mean, if you're small, you're probably gonna care less as you mentioned the example with the plumber.

Yeah, if it's all bringing more, why spend tracking if you could spend more on ads?

Yeah, exactly that. But there will be maturity point where you will need to zoom in and understand what works, what doesn't, and report to different functions Okay. That's a good shout. All right. Let's go in rapid questions. Got it. So a couple of questions which couldn't squeeze in. So let's go. What's one LinkedIn Ads mistake you still see even experienced marketers making in 2025? You just mentioned one.

Promoting content that you yourself don't even like.

Yeah.

So that you can get leads for cheap and send it to some SDR who eventually can't get them on a call. Call and you waste the company's money.

Yeah, I actually know exactly what you mean. I've been in that boat myself. When you're auditing a failing LinkedIn campaign, what's the first thing you look at?

Are they running conversation ads or not? And are they doing anything with direct response? Remember, the platform's too expensive to just do brand advertising and content promotion on. You have to go for direct response. You have to go for an offer, the kill. You have to try to get a human to a sales moment or else your blended cost is just too high to sustain or to scale.

What's your go-to when it comes to offer? Let's say you have an OfferX and you're looking at the failing campaign and you go like, this is working, this is working. The moment we give them a message which has the offer, it just goes somewhere down and you're now sort of evaluating the offer like What's your mindset through that?

Yeah, um, just do less. I think people do more than their budget allows. So they had 8 industries, pick one, bro.

Okay.

They've got 7 personas, pick one title in one industry, in one country.

Yep.

And one employee size. So go after directors of demand gen, at B2B software companies with 200 to 500 employees. I promise you it'll work. Okay. And if it doesn't, you have a positioning product and service problem, not an advertising problem.

I get what you're saying. What do you actually say in the messages? Like when it comes to an offer, let's say you fix that, you know, you still need to sort of write your copy, which is actually the second question is about what is, you know, what is a good copy or what is a good copy for an offer? Like in view of you, like you read this and you go like, Brilliant.

You do what I call a direct response sandwich and you use charm language.

Okay.

So you put the incentive in the beginning and the end and the value prop in the middle. You do it like that. And a lot of people save their incentive to the end, but then no one read. And you don't get the reading statistics on LinkedIn for combo ads. So you have to hook 'em. So people would normally go, You know, hey Mike, I'm Garrett from Directive and we help, you know, marketers just like you drive more SQLs. And I would rewrite that and say, hey Mike, 29 minutes, $105 gift card, and 3 strategies that can change your performance in the next 90 days. My name is Garrett Marigut. I head up marketing for Directive. Serving brands like X, Y, and Z. Yeah.

Okay.

I get to help them through the following services that generate the following outcomes. Take a call with my team, 29 minutes, $105 gift card, and you'll learn why WizGong and Dropbox have renewed for 3 years in a row or whatever that is.

Okay. So that's like what is called curiosity gap. Effectively, you just leave this hook with the curiosity of like, okay, well, What is that?

Like, yeah, but I don't say 30 minutes and $100 gift card. I say 29 minutes and $105.

What's the difference? Like, what is the catch over here? 29 to 80?

Well, yeah, it's like if you take the concept of thinking fast and thinking slow. Yeah, I need you to think slow, so I'll write things that disrupt your pattern and make it right. Okay, shockingly memorable.

Okay, so you basically purposely disrupt you. Yep.

So that you consume the information and you actively read. And I'll never write more than 3 lines without a paragraph break.

No more than 3 lines in a paragraph. Yeah.

So if you do this and you close your eyes like this and you go read something that has more than 3 lines, and it's a 5-line— yeah, maybe 4 sentences, it's like 5 lines before a paragraph break— your brain opts out. You won't read it, I promise you.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean, it's either how we consume information these days or, or something with our brains, but you're absolutely right. Um, yeah, it's just like you lose attention quickly. Um, okay, that's brilliant. I love that. Uh, I love that pattern-breaking, uh, advice. That's excellent, right? Who's one signal— uh, sorry, what's one signal in the data that tells you that the ad is fatiguing before it actually, you know, just sort of jumps off the cliff?

I don't know, that'd be a question for one of my media buyers. Okay, they could probably tell you like at what ad frequency they like to switch it. I think for me, I don't exclude myself from my own ads, and when I'm like, what the hell, I'm tired of seeing this, I pause it. I think once again, like, common sense first principles, like don't exclude yourself from your own ads. And then when you're tired of seeing an ad and you're just like, does this company do anything else? Is there any other value? Is this You should experience your own marketing. If you experience your own marketing and you stay curious, you'll know when it needs something new.

Okay. That's a good shout. Do you look at your competition marketing and see what they're doing? Like what type of campaigns they're running, how the creative looks like?

No.

No?

Not at all. I could care less about them.

Okay.

Yeah, no, I'm pretty obsessive of my own customers, my own employees.

Yep.

Um, you know, most of my competitors, they get hot for a little bit and they get successful and big, and then they don't— aren't able to consistently deliver results, and they're not able to sustain their success, and they go through a lot of churn, and they eventually, you know, shrink. It's a really hard industry, man. So I focus less on my competitors and I focus more on where I'm trying to go or maybe a new competency of where I see B2B marketing going and something I'm not good at. And so I'm not so worried about competitors so much as people who I don't compete with that I wish I offered their service and I try to either acquire them or learn from them.

Okay, excellent. What's your take on budget allocation? Do you prefer fixed splits by funnel stages or fluid? Based on results?

I don't know what those are. I just charge a percent of ad spend.

Okay. I mean, I think you answered that in the beginning when you said give enough budget for campaigns to actually run and give you numbers instead of capping by—

Yeah, sometimes we'll give people a min, but I don't charge per channel. I usually want them to spend $10K per channel or else I don't think they should test it because I don't think it's a real test. Um, you know, because then you don't get enough clicks to optimize. Okay, so you know, if you run a campaign and it gets 90 clicks, say it gets 98 clicks, right? And that's the 99th and 100th convert, it's a 2% conversion rate, it's not so bad. How do you know if you got 70 clicks but then you ran out of budget? Like, yeah, you know, so I, I try to do that. And then, you know, for downmarket folks, we have $5K a month flat pricing until they spend up in the 20s, I think. So In general, we try to make ourselves more affordable than people think.

Good shout. Do you have any incentive, what you did with like, hey, here's a gift card, something which actually flopped and just didn't work at all?

Yeah, everything, man. Nothing ever works. I mean, the gift card doesn't work most of the time until you figure out different copy, different targeting, different messaging. There's no magic bullet, man. Marketers aren't magicians. They just have to be gritty, tough, and curious. You know. So, okay, I think the lie that everyone thinks is like— Directive as a methodology that works based on first principles, eventually. What I mean by that is like, what you got to control is, are you proactively communicating with your client? Are you deeply curious and excited and passionate about their product and who they serve? Do you meet with their product team? Do you go through all their YouTube videos? Do you know every pixel on their website? Have you researched every one of their quarterly earnings reports? Are you obsessed about being the best marketer in the world for your client? And if you are, you will eventually do a great job for them. And if you're not, you won't. And so what I try to do is build a culture that's very intense and competitive for its consultants and the marketers, you know, that we employ, so that we eventually are successful with every client because we're so curious about who they are, why they exist, who they service, what makes them different, not better, that we eventually figure out how to position them and frame them in the marketplace and then efficiently allocate their capital to people who can buy. You know, like, you, you figure it out, but it's always a challenge and it's unique every time.

Okay. Do you have any, um, LinkedIn piece of advice when it comes to ads which you don't agree, which you see a lot and you go like—

You should do all those, like I think your ebooks and your white papers and the content you're promoting stinks.

I do. Is that just like a thing of a past or you think—

No, I see it every day. I mean, I do 5, 6 calls a day still with people and no, every one of them is doing this. I have no idea why. It's because you're supposed to. Most marketers are like sheep instead of cowboys, and we would do a lot better for ourselves and be more impactful and make more money and create more value for our companies if we thought creatively and independently and we just did the opposite of everyone else. You want to be Liquid Death, you don't want to be Dasani.

That's a great saying, but people, I mean, they still do it, I would imagine. So what's the thinking? Is that, okay, this is cheap Uh, I'm gonna get the lead, I'm gonna get an email, then I can—

no, they get a lead, they get to hit their number and go to sleep like a little baby.

Yeah.

And then they eventually get fired.

Yeah, because they didn't deliver.

Or the finance function says, what did we get for our investment? And they say leads. And then the CFO says, well, revenue's down 15%. And then they fire them for misalignment. Okay, this happens. It's really sad, but that is truthfully what happens. Like, let me ask you this question, Mike. When was the last time you were on LinkedIn, got an ad for an ebook or an asset of content, stopped what you were doing, put in your information, downloaded it, read it, and then reached out to the organization because you wanted to learn more? How many years ago was the last time? 8 years ago?

I can tell you it was, um, it was when I switched from being individual contributor as a, you know, software engineer to actually leading teams. So that was about like 14, 15 years back. So I really cared about doing better. It was a different room. It's a—

Yeah, we did that though. As humans, we would read things. Remember when we used to have this thing called blogs?

Yeah, yeah.

And then we would guest post on other people's blogs.

Newsletters as well.

And we would read the blogs. When was the last time you read a blog post, Mike?

Oh man, you're asking tough questions now. It's been a while.

But my point here is marketers—

It's been a while. Yeah.

Do not consume the marketing that they market. And that to me is disgusting.

Yeah, I get what you're saying.

It's almost like saying we just do what we're supposed to do without ever questioning if we even would do it ourselves.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like 99% of the marketers wouldn't consume the marketing that they're marketing.

I love what— yeah, I love what you're saying over here. It's like, yeah, it's a great shout. And now I'm guilty of the same. I sometimes produce content. I'm like, I know it's not great. I'm still going to put it up because I was doing it. And but then it's the last thing the internet needs is more crappy content. Yeah, and I'm guilty of it.

Like, I'm not saying I'm some saint and everyone else is sinners. What I'm trying to call out is the behaviors of marketers are antithetical to their own best interests and how they actually themselves consume information. Like right now, nobody on B2B is talking about the fact that they have no strategy for TikTok and Instagram. And YouTube, yet they themselves at night spend 99% of their time on their phones going through short-form video content on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and their own brand has no strategy for it.

Yeah, I see that as well.

That's unwise.

Do you have any— I mean, we're talking about LinkedIn here, but do you guys do anything else as an agency? Uh, when it comes to advertisement for B2B space?

Yeah, I mean, I, I still manage, you know, 3 times more on Google.

Okay.

Um, Reddit, a lot of connected TV, a lot of programmatic. Um, 13% of our revenue comes from programmatic. So I mean, we have big content offering here where we're trying to help people create tools and interactive content and functional content, not just more blog posts that nobody reads, okay, with traffic that nobody monetizes. You know, like, B2B companies don't monetize informational traffic very well when they're not product-led, you know what I mean? So if you're MailChimp and you have a massive library of email templates, that's a dope strategy.

Yeah.

If you're Sumo Logic, it's not. Um, you know, I took Sumo Logic public, I took SendinOne public, I did everything for New Relic. I did everything for all these Arctic Wolves and all the players. We've gotten to work with all the big, especially the dev, like the tech, like your audience, the very technical software companies. We've worked with almost all of them. You have to be more creative and nuanced. You have to say, what's the magic moment of our product when an engineer or developer says, yes, that is what I need? How do I take that moment and how do I integrate it to the marketing so they can experience it before they hop on a sales call?

Yeah.

How do I take that moment of the demo that resonates and activates the person? How do I tell that story before they ever get to a sales moment? That's the questions we should be thinking about, not how can I get 3 ebooks done this quarter so I hit my lead goal.

Still works though as a lead goal. So, so people still leaving their emails. So I imagine that's why it's still a thing.

No, they get fired. Those marketers get fired, man. It doesn't work for them.

Yeah.

And then they end up unemployed, searching for their next job, wondering what happened. They do. They get—

because you wrote the books, man. It's because of the ebooks. Yeah, I mean, no, it's because of a misalignment with the organization's economics.

And what they end up doing is they try to justify and rationalize the value of what they do, even though it's not showing up on the company's profit and loss statement. and from that misalignment, the organization lets go of them.

Yeah, because the results are just not there. All right, well, this is, uh, this is brilliant, Garrett. So if people want to just get to know more about Directive, or you personally, uh, um, or Ava, it's just like, where do they get in touch?

Yeah, so I do 4 different things right now. I guess 5 if you count, I do a tournament fishing team in Cabo. So that's what I like to do for fun.

Wow, nice.

That's the 5th thing. The things I do is I run Directive, which is a performance marketing agency for B2B. I run ABE, which is a LinkedIn ads agency. And I run More Good Capital, which is my holdco that I buy agencies with. And then lastly, there's garethmerigood.com where I coach agency owners on how to scale, and become more impactful with whatever their goals are. Some people want to be a lifestyle agency, other people want to be a holdco, right? And so either way, I help them. So I coach agency owners, I do marketing for B2B, uh, Directive and Abe, and then I acquire agencies at Morgan Capital. And if I'm not doing that, I like to go fishing.

I used to fish, man, until I was like 16. But my dad still fishes, you know. I was just— became a teenager sort of Got my first computer, you know, that was like a while back, and then fishing somewhere disappeared in life. Now I have two boys and we're going, you know, summer holidays in two weeks, and they did— they can start talking about fishing, so that's gonna be great. So you, you do this like, like, uh, not like professionally, as in you're not making money, but it's like competitive?

Like, no, yeah, I mean, I got a check right here for $4,800 where we won a tournament, man.

So what, like, what's going on is like you go competitions and you actually win, or is it Yeah, okay, nice. Is it like you won like alone, or you like a team?

I have a team. No, I definitely don't win alone. I'm, I'm just the owner. It's like a horse racing or F1. It's not— yeah, like you have a boat, you have a captain, and then you have crew, and you have anglers, and then you gamble as much money as you're willing to lose betting on if you can catch the biggest fish. And hopefully, you know, you pre-fish, and like we have a boat full-time in Cabo and a full-time captain, and We pre-fish and we use all the different technology and we use local resources and we'll be down there for weeks. I'll be working remote and then fishing at night trying to prepare, and then yeah, we compete.

Yeah, that's excellent, man.

It's 100+ other boats. Yes, it's crazy.

Oh, it's awesome, man. We got good businesses, buying agencies, scaling, working with the biggest brands on the planet, you know, spending weeks fishing. Seems like you got everything in order. Last question, Garrett. Um, the agencies you buy, is that like M&A activity? Do you like scale by, by acquisition effectively? Like, is that how you look at that?

Yeah, like right now we're looking, um, at a couple different acquisitions, working with origination partner. Um, yeah, we're trying to get a deal done.

Yeah, so you're basically growing by acquisition. You just want to—

one of the ways Yeah, I wouldn't say it's all of it. It's a smaller percentage than the organic growth. Yeah, but it is definitely a growth channel for us. Um, usually we're looking though to acquire a competency, someone who does something that we don't do that we know we could sell to our customers. Yeah, that we believe is on the cutting edge of where, um, the consumption of B2B marketers is going, right? And I always want to be there. So like for us, like right now, buying a TikTok ads agency I think makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and it's something I'm looking to do.

Excellent. All right, well, to our listeners, if you enjoyed the episode and you have someone in your network who are running LinkedIn ads right now and you feel like this would be a valuable episode, please do share that with them. And as always, guys, till the next time, stay safe and see you online.