#148: Strategy | Will AI Impact SEO, Are Sales and Marketing Converging, The Timeless Principles of Marketing (With John Short)

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far, we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more.

One, two, three, four.

Exit, exit.

Exit. Good to see you, dude. Hello. First of all, I gotta do a disclaimer. I gotta do a disclaimer. John, Somebody was mad that I always have you on and I recommend you. And to that I have to say sorry. It is what it is and I'm not sorry. In this life, in this business, in this world, you make a couple of friends along the way and I enjoy hanging out with you and I enjoy like, we have families, we have shared interests, we happen to be connected in this space of B2B marketing. I like to have you regularly on the podcast. Somebody sent me a message and they said they don't like how anytime somebody is looking for a recommendation for an agency, I always recommend you and compound growth. They were really mad about that. And I'm not laughing to take away from that. I, I understand that, but I actually, I really don't feel bad about it because, like, you and me go back and I have every right to, like, you're a good person, you do a good job, you do good business. I'm gonna keep recommending you and that it is what it is. Like, I can't remember every agency that you know under the sun. And it is unfortunate not everybody's gonna have a fair chance to be, to be recommended. But I like talking to you, John, and you're gonna keep coming back on. And I just want to give that disclaimer. So now if anybody knows, like, be careful, be careful if you do want to work with compound growth, because I am, I am friends with John and just heads up. But we go, we go back to starting your first business when you didn't even want to build an agency when you were just going to be solo. John and I saw you at the Friendly Toast, which we've talked about a bunch of times. So there's the legal disclaimer. That is the, the conflict of interest statement. Now that we've put that out in the open, we can continue on with this.

Yeah. And to that person, I'd say I, I'd love to be friends.

Yeah. Or, or like, you know, tell me if you, if you operate a great business, like, feel free to tell me about it. The hard part is just going to be like, I'm not going to be able to keep up with the, with the results. So.

Yeah, you just asked for a lot of Twitter DMs right there. Exactly.

Don't DM me on Twitter. You got new cgm, new CGM hats. I like that.

Yeah. CGM hats.

Yeah.

We got Carhartt, which was some Carhartt winter hats as well.

Okay.

Which is an interesting mix of kind of a blue collar brand and a very remote white collar company.

It's like Patrick Cantlay and DeWalt. He has Goldman Sachs and DeWalt as sponsors. And that joke will not land with, you know, 1 1000th of this podcast. But that's, that's okay. I'm always just interested. What. Tell me about your week. What's going. What, what has gone on? What. Just. What did you do this week at work? I'm. I'm interested as a friend. What's your work? What's your week? What's week been like?

I had a couple of lunch meetings. We just brought on a new head, head of Client services, who I'm not kind of talking about publicly yet, but we just brought someone on there. So Was spending a lot of time onboarding them. But it's an interesting time in the company. I've talked about it a little bit with people inside the company, but I'm kind of like relearning what my role is in the company because we brought on a chief revenue officer in November and then this client services person. And up until now that's been a big part of my job. And so now, you know, it gives me time to focus on different things. So it's been an interesting week, a week of self reflection. And I was talking to our mutual friend Chris about, hey, you know, now I gotta figure out where my focus goes next.

Yeah, Chris, I talked to him last week. He's great. Chris Litzler. Chris is like a CEO coach now. And he was, he ran a bunch of the business back in the day when I worked at Constant Contact. I was a very junior marketing person there and just took a liking to him and he took a liking to me. And I got to do skip level meetings with him like once a quarter. And I was always bummed when those got. You remember that, like when you got to have a meeting with like a big person and like, yeah, they would like reschedule it and you're like, oh, damn. But like the once a quarter I got to, I got to meet with him. It was, it was really cool. He's up in Vermont a lot now and I had texted you a couple weeks ago because we're doing a lot of things at exit 5 and I felt like we. I felt like I could use some strategic guidance and like now that we're really doing this thing, like, you know, I value our relationship and I like to text you, but having someone who's seen a bunch of things just. It's lonely and you get trapped in your own head. And so I caught, you know, I got. Called him up and we just talked. It was like an hour therapy session and he took great notes and we had a bunch of good ideas come out of that. But it was much like therapy in that. Like, there's not a lot that wasn't necessarily new, groundbreaking stuff. But I needed to like get it, say it out loud and then like have somebody talk it back to me and understand. And it was, it was really valuable.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like it's a really interesting time at exit 5. And I'm curious, like more like what were you trying to. Are you okay to talk about?

But I'll talk about anything, definitely. Yeah, I'm open.

What were you trying to get out of the conversation with Chris, like, what? Cause we've texted about it.

Yeah.

And I thought I knew and I recommended like Eos. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Well, I guess for me the biggest thing is just trying to think about, like, what is the future of the business look like. And because I see a very clear path that is just like, keep doing what we're doing, keep the things, like have the same structure and just do a little bit more and it will grow a little bit every year. But that's not what I want to do. You know, that's not that exciting to me. And so I just needed a place to put that. And what he helped me frame is something that I've been actually thinking about a lot, which is, and I have no problem. Exit 5 isn't going anywhere. The business is doing great. It's going to continue to grow. We should quite easily double this year, which, I mean, you'd hope to do that. It was just me last year. I brought on two full time people and like, yeah, if we didn't double, like, but, but it's great. Things are going great. I'm happy, everything's happy. We've basically, we've doubled the business, reduced my time in the weeds, scaled and automated all of the systems, which is amazing. I mean, as recently as four or five months ago, I was managing all the podcasts, like post podcast production, pressing upload on a new episode myself, doing all the social, making sure the newsletter goes out, working with sponsors, building more pipeline, figuring out ways to grow the community, making sure, oh my God, I haven't logged in the community in two days. Like, I got to go in there and post this stuff. All that stuff is happening. And you know, we have a team and people and it's the most amazing feeling. But I just was like, I read this book, 10x is easier than 2x. I don't know if you know that.

Yeah, no, I haven't read it, but.

Okay, it could be a blog post. No disrespect, you know, my book founder brand probably could have been a blog post too. So that's okay. But basically the concept is like, it's much easier, it's easier to grow 10x than it is to grow 2x. Because 2x, you kind of just need to keep doing mo, like just do a little bit more. And that's exactly where we're at right now. Like the way we have. We grew from where we're at last year to where we're at Today is more, a little bit more, a little bit better, a little bit more, a little bit more focused, yada, yada, yada. So we're going to keep doing that. But this is, I see such an opportunity here. Not necessarily like with the community business. Like, I don't, I don't see a world where I want to have a 5, 10,000 plus member community. That's, that's not what I'm after. There's just a lot of, we have strong product market fit. The things people talk about around Exit 5, like the demand from sponsors is there, new member growth, the connections and relationships and things people are getting out of the community is there every day. I'm like, man, this is amazing. And people, when they come, like Dan and Matt who came in the business and saw that, they're like, whoa, this is, this is real. And Dan, Dan said to me, he's like, this thing has the same buzz that we had at the last two companies that we worked together. And like, this is real. This is so real.

Yeah.

And I just keep thinking, okay, so I'm obsessed with this 10x thing. Like, it's easier to grow 10x because you need to like, push yourself to not think of the small optimizations you want to think of, like the big. What are the big ideas? Right? And if, even if you don't grow, the goal is not to grow 10x, right? Let's like, let's say Exit 5 is a $2 million a year business right now the goal is not to next year go to 20, but if you shoot for 10x, you're going to miss and maybe you grow 6x. And it's like, so I really have been on this, obsessed on this idea of like thinking about what am I not seeing? What's the real lever and real opportunity here? And that's kind of what I wanted to talk to Chris about. Just like, hey, am I thinking about this? Right? I have a couple of ideas about like, what the next play should be and really I'll share it on this podcast. Like, I see Exit 5 today as a product and business that I, that I'll continue to run. But I think there's a bigger wrapper here that I'm operating, which is more of like a holding company where exit 5 as you see it today is, is one part of that. But there might be Thing two and Thing three, and I'm getting much closer to doing that. And man, I can't believe I'm going to tell you this. I think I really want to build A software product. Okay.

What type of software? Like marketing software?

I have no idea. I don't know yet. Marketing? No. Yeah, marketing. Yep. And I don't know, I'm being vulnerable and telling people this and sharing this publicly, but we will make a million dollars in revenue this year off of talking about other people's products.

Yeah.

We should have our own product.

Yeah.

And we should sell that product. Right. And I don't want to do it just to make money. I want to do it because I'm passionate about. I want to find something really interesting. And so I'm starting to think more like, okay, what are the. What are the spheres? And I wrote this book, founder brand, a couple of years ago, and I kind of forgot about it. Didn't really. I got busy, did some other stuff, didn't really care about it. I still see people talking about it and it just. Yeah, it was another thing that reminded me, like, man, there's something here I shouldn't be. I don't need to try to like, monetize a golf podcast and build a. Do this thing. I just need to double down on this area. Like, I have this written on a post it note on my desk, which.

Is, rory, come on the pod.

Rory, come on the pod. Which is unique ability. Like, what is your unique. What's your unique ability? And I think my unique ability is like one, the ability to write and communicate and content. That's a thing. But then also, what we've built the audience and reputation and force that we have in this niche of B2B marketing. And so I'm like, yeah, imagine if we built an amazing tool. I don't know what that tool is. Imagine if we built a tool that like all of the people that we that listen to this podcast could. Could use. Like, that's the opportunity. And so I don't know if it's going to happen, but that's the type of stuff that I'm like, pushing myself to think of. And it's so funny because you and I have had many conversations where like, two years ago, I was, man, like, I was like, screw this, I want to shut it down. No more B2B marketing. I want to go live on a farm.

Yeah.

But anyway, that's. So sorry to. Sorry to talk for so long that.

That's kind of. How many years into this were you before you started hiring?

Technically, four.

Okay.

I started on Patreon in December, in like, December of 2019. I rebranded it, repackaged it as Exit 5 in like 8. In April of 22. So two years ago. And so. So I was like two years into the real business part of it before I decided to hire.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I started my thing the same way. It was like I wanted to get out of the city, I wanted to spend more time with family, I wanted to work on intellectually simulating projects. And then three years in, it was like, okay, it's time to start hiring. And it was a similar kind of inflection point or piece of advice I had gotten. I forget who it was from. I think it was like, probably somebody on VC Twitter who is essentially the same thing. It's just as Easy to try to 10x as it is to try to maintain the same. And one of the people who's been a close advisor to our company, one of the first things he ever said to me, and it kind of fell on dull ears because I wasn't ready to start hiring at that point was, if you're not growing, you're dying. And I didn't really understand what that was because I think I was probably still in my first year of business. But if you're not growing, you're dying. Like, there's a lot of truth to that saying. It's not completely true. There are a ton of people who have great careers as consultants or running a lifestyle business that produces enough cash flow for them to live very comfortably. But to me, through my experiences, it's kind of rung true of you're spending just as much energy trying to just stay afloat as you are trying to grow and become a much bigger company.

So, yeah, and I think I see how it's so easy to just get caught up in the whack a mole of like all of those little fires and you never actually, like, take the next step. And I think hiring was a huge piece in me taking the next step. Also, I was so hesitant to like, build a real business because I. My kids are, you know, our kids are similar age. I had the opportunity to like, work, work from home and be around a lot. And so I was like, I didn't want to like, sacrifice that life. And I've just realized, like, no, I'm in charge. Like, we can build the business the way that I want and we can build it around those things and I can have both. And also I'm creative and competitive. Like, I need those. I need those things. I need this. And so I need those pockets of work to. To give me structure and like, provide some clarity for like, ah, I love, like, I Can't wait. It's you and I recording this at like 2:30 on a Friday after this podcast. I'm done. I'm shutting this stuff down and I'm done. I'm done for the afternoon and we're gonna go hang out and my kids will be home and like I can just be home and still be excited about business. I think I was caught up in this like binary. Like I either have to be at a 500 person company in an office or, or doing this. And I think I've gotten a lot of clarity on that. So I don't know if, I don't know, I don't know for sure if we're going to do that. But that's the stuff that I'm starting to think about and I don't want people listening to think that that's going to mean not investing in Exit 5. I don't see Exit 5 going anywhere. And that in fact I think Exit 5 is like the moat where the community, the podcast, the content, that's actually the strategic piece of that, that needs to keep growing. Right. I just see it as like, man, so many other startup, like a new company could come in this space and they would, they would kill to have the audience that we have and the engagement that we have. We just got to figure out what the right thing is to do. And turns out like, we're also pretty good at marketing and so if we can find the right product, you know, and people have told me not to do this in the past. They're like, you have no idea what you're doing. You don't know how to build a software product. And you're, you're right, I don't. But we have a budget, we have teams, we have people like, yeah, yeah, I've seen much, much, much worse. People find their way.

Have you thought about acquisition entrepreneurship?

Yes, yes. So I, I think it's build or buy. Yeah. Uhhuh.

Yeah.

And you and I should talk a lot about that. But I, I, yeah, I, I, I, it's, it's tough. I see a lot of stuff out there and I'm like, I just don't know, I don't know how good this is. There's definitely a play though. And I know, I know how you think there's definitely a play of like buying a business, making it better. That would be very strong out of the gate for sure.

Yeah, it's scary. I mean, I go on those sites all the time. I think that's like the new equivalent of buying A domain. Right? You just.

Well, there's no, you go on those sites, there's no domains left.

Yeah, yeah, there are no, no, but you just go on those sites, you browse, you, you know, send it around and you're like, should we do this? Like, should. And then you're like, what's going to happen when I purchase this? Is just. Did somebody just like copy the front end UI of some other software, rebrand it? Now they're trying to sell it to me.

I don't like, when I don't know about something which is, I don't know about a lot of things. And you know, it's like, am I going to put up $725,000 to like buy this thing? And then someone's like, well, actually if you do this, you can only pay this and you only put this down. I'm like, there's just so much that I don't know that you know what I mean?

My new favorite follow on Instagram, there's a guy who kind of breaks down the business advice.

He sees, let me just write some tweets and I'll be good. Like, let me write some copy and I'll be, I'll be good.

Well, I'm excited, I'm excited to see it.

Well, thanks. So, yeah, so we're thinking about something about that. And when I say we, I think like, that's, that's also what's cool about bringing like Dan into the business. I don't, I don't see him just as like operating at exit 5. I think we have the opportunity to build a small team that will work on these things together. And I think that's like, it's, it's not a team that just works on Exit five. Like I see us building a team of three to five people that work on all of our businesses together.

Yeah. You know, yeah.

Also the, the more that I see, it's like, ah, the business you, you need. The, the obstacle is the way, like I want, I want ultimate freedom. I want more time with my family. Like, this is going to be the way to, to get, to get that. Okay. I actually did some prep for this conversation today.

What?

So you said there's a lot going on in the world. I'm happy to talk about all the changes happening in marketing, Google cookies, Google and Bing using AI, the farce of AI generated content. And I'm actually just going to flip over. I'm just going to put you on the hot seat and I have a bunch of questions prepared. So all Right, here we go. I used my assistant, Mr. GPT.

Have you tried Gemini yet?

No. What's Gemini?

That's Google's. No, I'm trying.

Terrible. I've just heard Google's terrible. They've. It's a whole thing is their AI is terrible. Okay, don't sue me. Um, no. Is it good? Is it, is it good?

I. I can't get access to it. I'm trying to get access. I'm. It's been a two day challenge of me going through it, but I'm interested because if we look at what's happening in the world right now, Google is like obviously gonna, the changes to Google is obviously gonna have a big impact on me. And I've started playing around with Google's beta of putting generative.

Before you say that, can you clarify what you mean by that? Google's changes are going to have a big impact. Oh, yeah.

So Google. Sorry, I was getting to that. Google is starting to show more generative AI at the top of the search results, which is pushing a lot of the organic search results down. People are concerned about what impact that's going to have on their business and all the work that they've done from an SEO perspective.

Wait, so, so, so showing more generative AI, meaning like they're just, they're using their AI just answer questions, right?

Yeah. So it's because some could see it as Google trying to become more of a destination rather than the kind of bowtie model where somebody has come in, they've done a search, and then Google has sent them off another way. Google is looking to provide more of the answers in the search results. And the way that Google, Google's search results, generative AI search results look and the way that ChatGPT's generative AI search result looks are very different and a time of change. The Internet has. And the products that are built on the Internet have continued to innovate in favor of the user. So when you're looking at any kind of business competition, generally if you look at what's best for the customer, you can start to predict who is going to win and who is going to lose out when you pay attention to that. And so what I'm trying to understand is why people really like ChatGPT and form my own opinions as people start to adopt Google, Gemini and Google generative AI or SGE in the search results. My opinion is that Google is providing a better experience because in ChatGPT, you ask it a question, it gives you an answer. I don't know 70% of the time it's right. 30% of the time it's way wrong. But there's no way to check to understand whether or not it's right or wrong. Whereas Google is surfacing, still citing sources, still linking out to results under the information that they provide so that you can dive in deeper, you can go to a site and kind of fact check some of the information that you're getting. And so I tend to think that over time, like, ChatGPT is going to start to evolve their results so that they have more data to back up. And I think we've already seen this. They have some quotations or.

I don't always see them. For some reason though somebody showed me that and I'm doing it right now. So I'm just like, what are the most popular rides at Disney? I don't always see the quotations. I was just on 3.5, now I'm on 4. And so I'm like, is that true? What has your experience been? You don't. Do you see sources?

I, I see that, yeah. I see those sources from time to time. I. They don't. They don't always.

From time to time?

From time to time, yes. So you're not seeing them right now on four?

No, I just switched. No, I'm not seeing them. And yeah, this is really interesting. So, and, and also, like, you run an agency and you do a lot of se. Like you do SEO services. Right. And so, like, that world is going to change. Yeah, I use chat GPT all the time now. Like, I would say I don't, I, I don't know the math, but I, I would guess that it's eaten into my Google search, like 20 or 30% of the time.

20 or 30%.

No. No doubt.

Yeah.

Now, not for something like, you know, I guess, like, I would define as transactional, like more transactional things. I'm going to go to Google, like a restaurant.

Really?

Yeah. Looking for a restaurant, I'm going to go to Google.

Oh, okay. Like cat GBT for a restaurant.

Like, no, no, but chat gbt, like, I will use to answer questions. So give you an example. One of my hobbies is golf. You, you know this, right. But I'm just saying this for people. I'm obsessed with it and I like to ask a lot of questions. Maybe you're, maybe you're, you're curious about fishing or boating or whatever. Golf, whatever you do CrossFit. So I am learning a lot about the golf swing. Right. And there's a difference between the way that you're supposed to hit an iron on an iron you're supposed to hit down on the ball and on a driver you're supposed to hit up on the ball. I wanted to know why. Why is that? That's the perfect thing to go to chat GBT and ask. And so I said hey, I'm trying to learn more about the golf swing. It's common knowledge that with an iron you want to hit down on the golf ball with the driver you want to hit up. Why would that? Why is that? Explain that to me in simple terms and explains the physics. So like there's, there's a certain type of effect that when you hit down on the ball you actually with an iron the way the club is you trying to launch it up in the ground and create spin so it goes high and you're trying to create the force into the ground versus driver you want to hit up. There's a cat in front of the camera versus a driver you want to hit up on the ball and have no spin. And so like it. I use it to answer questions not like who did X but I ask it to answer questions like that or, or I'll ask it like why, you know, why did this thing happen? And are there other think you know, are there others examples of this in the past? And so it's me. Jesus Christ. It's made me a much better. This is. I live in an animal house. It's insane. Two children, two cats, there's two dogs.

Really breaking the stereotype of Vermont here.

Absolutely not.

Some chickens in the background.

Absolutely not.

You'll just break the stereotype.

I keep this spray bottle here just in case anyone tries to get smart. So I use it for stuff like that John. Like that. That's like more thorough stuff because the Google. There's so much nonsense that you get from Google, you know, you know you got these high authority sites that have been ranking forever with listicles and nonsense on the first page. Half of the first page is ads and then they're starting to show this stuff in search. So I'm using it more for research like that. But yeah, that is they're getting this information from somewhere and they're not, they're not. So showing me the sources in that. And so it sucks if that's your business. And like they're just sucking that information and not giving you any of the traffic. But I could imagine that's not going to last forever. But I, I totally, I'm not an SEO geek but I see how like, wait a second, if these AI tools are answering your questions now, like, what does that mean for search? And search has so long been a humongous channel in marketing. There's, there's something big happening.

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Yeah, 100%. And there are a couple of thoughts there. One is, is there going to be regulatory pressure for like a lot of the content providers went through this kind of situation from 2000 to 2008 as search engines became more popular and I think they regret their decision of how they handled it and they probably would have tried to sue the pants off of Google sooner. I don't know. I don't want to, I don't want to discuss that as much because I'm not as much of an expert there. But like I think that could be a blocker at some point that Google would have an advantage on because it's already citing its sources, it's already sharing where it's getting this information from. Yeah, I've lost trust with ChatGPT because sorry, a lot of my answers haven't been great. Like I asked it where should I go vote in my town for local elections and it said many small towns or it told me to like go to a and I asked it specifically for my town which I'm not going to share here but it told me to go to the police station and it was just like dead on confident. Go to the police station to vote. And it didn't.

Yeah, but it's not good for stuff like that. That's why I said like that that's a local search result. I wouldn't use it for something like that. Now if you wanted to understand like the history of voting and why voting or you know, why vote like, like how long has voting then that would be a better use for no.

So I mean I don't want to go down the rat hole but for that, from that search and other searches I'm like, okay, this thing doesn't always know what it's talking about. I'd rather go to Google, go to something else where I can see the source and understand the information and where it's coming from. It's then interesting to kind of bounce ideas off of with ChatGPT and kind of get its feedback and have some of the internal dialogues that I have on a day to day basis with CHAT GPT. But I also think chatgpt will get better at that and I think we'll see a lot of improvement there maybe with chat GPT5. But if you look at what we're Talking about though, what you're talking about is like a high funnel search which as a marketer you would be looking to rank for that to start to build trust. Yeah, that's with a, with a customer. If you're day. If you were, you know, let's say you were a golf coach and your name was like Dave Jankowski or something.

Like that, he's a New England PGA teacher of the year. No big deal. Yep.

And he was looking to drive more traffic to our site. Traditionally he would have provided an answer to that on his site, driven traffic to his site, built trust with you, and ultimately had to become his customer. But if you do a search for the best golf coaches In New England, ChatGPT's result looks pretty similar to what Google's result looks like, where it's going to list out a couple of the best coaches in the area and it's going to give you the result. I don't know as much about if you search for PGA coaches, but if you look for the best software and why industry on ChatGPT, it gives you a list of 10 bullets of who the software providers are that you should be looking at. And like that's very similar to SEO as it is today. The ranking factors I'm sure are pretty similar because when you go to Google and you go to ChatGPT, you see similar results up there. And with ChatGPT like that type of experience, one, I think the ranking factors are similar, but you're also going to be able to start asking it. Okay, that's great. Thank you for the list. I'm a small business with 30 employees and we're looking to, for integrations with X, Y and Z. It can maybe narrow down the results and start to give you recommendations over time. But the big kind of point that I have right here is upper funnel content is the most impacted right now from searches. That's where most of the searches are getting lost, is people who are looking for information, how to's, that kind of stuff, which were kind of early traffic drivers. But the down funnel search results in ChatGPT and Google are not that different in that you're showing intent, you're in market and you're, you're actively looking to make a buying decision.

Yeah. What do you think about cookies? What, what's going on in the world of cookies? So AI is a big, a big thing. You told me about cookies. What specifically about them?

Yeah. So we're seeing Google Chrome and many of the other browsers start to block the usage of cookies. On the site. So we're moving into a first party data world where the data that you own, building trust with customers, getting them to make themselves known on your site, and being able to build audiences off of that is going to change, I think with all of these things. With Google search, we've seen iterations of the search results changing ever since 2001 when Google started, where local search results have come onto the scene, they've impacted clicks, we've seen them add other features to the search results. And that's kind of an indication of what's going to happen when generative search results takes over the top result. With the cookie less world, we've seen indications of this through some of the mobile challenges.

You ever seen that meme when it's like these two guys and they're like, take the cookie. Do you want the cookie? Take the cookie. And this guy's like shoving this. They do. Do you accept the cookies? It's so good. That's all. That's what I think about every time.

But. So the iOS change was a indicator of what's going to happen, you know, and I, I think what we've seen is Facebook has adapted pretty well to continuing to be able to target people pretty efficiently through advertising. Measurement's going to get a little bit different, but the companies who are able to build trust and. Sounds so cliche, but build trust, build a direct connection with the customer, are going to be advantaged over the companies who can't.

Yeah, I'm, I'm on this. I'm not even. I'm not in the game as a CMO or anything right now. I just think about my own business and I spend hours, I guess I am in the game. I'm spending right now. I'm spending like four or five hours a week recording this podcast, talking to people in marketing. So I'm, I'm sharp. I'm sharp right now. I'm sharp and I am more bullish than ever that, like, none of this stuff matters the most. The only thing that matters is understanding the principle, the timeless principles. Like, you could plug me back in right now. I don't know anything about cookies. I don't know that much about AI. Plug me back in and I will do good work because I understand the importance of positioning and messaging, how to craft a narrative, how to, you know, how to find the right customers, how to get people to pay attention. That stuff matters so much. You had a post about this the other day about like abm, like this motion or that motion. Like, yeah, Those things matter. But. But they don't matter more than, like, the offer and the positioning and those things are. We're just in the next cycle of this. Like, there were marketers that, like, when HubSpot came out, you know, everybody's like, inbound marketing. There's some marketer was like, nope, doesn't matter. I know the timeless principles, and I guess I'm kind of at that to channel some T. Swift. Like, I'm in my timeless principles era right now, and I feel like that is more important than ever to understand.

Those things in your timeless principles era.

Yeah. How's that? Trademark. Trademark that.

Yeah. Try trademarking that.

See what you can't trade. Just like, there's no domains, there's no trademarks, anything anymore. Yeah. Our forefathers have all the trademarks.

Yeah. So everything's changing, but nothing's changing all at the same time.

Yeah.

Like, I. I go in these circles all the time. Like, when I think about what's happening with cookies. Like, we've had a couple of sites. It's funny, we've worked with a couple of companies based in Germany. They've all had CTOs who are, like, incredibly idealistic and follow GDPR past the letter of the law. So they have not allowed us to put any tracking pixels on the site. We've still figured out a way to understand, measure and calculate ROI on our marketing efforts. Even without that, I almost think it.

Would be better if nobody had access to any of those things. Like, so much of the nonsense in arguing about marketing and figuring out what's wrong with that, there was no cookies, there's no pixels, there's nothing. Like, how are you going to find out how people found out? Like, how are you going to know what's working?

It might be the ads you see on Facebook, are on. On Facebook and on LinkedIn are bad because people are trying to get you to click and do something versus get you to see the ad, get you to start to understand who the brand is, get to see the representation of the brand. Like, everybody is like, trying to ask you out on a date the first time they see you. Like, want a demo, want a demo, want a demo. And you don't even know who these brands are. And if you can get creative and like, take a step back and try to understand, okay, what's the impact of this on branded search, on direct, when we turn on LinkedIn ads and what happens when we ramp it up a little bit? And what happens if we're showing more ads in X location or you run different tests to kind or what happens when we get feedback from our sales team on how companies heard about us or we add that to the form. Like sometimes those methods of measuring are better and it might improve marketing overall from being so direct response driven like we've seen it since 2000, to being a little bit more creative and a little bit more helpful and better user experience.

How do you think about that though? Like that asking, you know, asking the first date question, right? Like, because I get why you do it. But it is hard to also like be patient. And marketing doesn't work linearly. So it's not like okay, for, for three months we're going to show this audience this message which is step one and then we're going to move them to like it just kind of is all jumbled. And so I can see why. I understand why we would want to set up a very linear buying process. But how do you. What's the right way to do this? You have different messages for different segments and at different places in different times. How do you navigate all that?

I mean right now, and this is one of the things that I think will change is we look at, I have used like predictive user scores on the site. So if we have an ad or if we drive users in organically from search or from social media and we can see, okay, they went in, they navigated across X amount of pages and they spent X amount of time or Y amount of time on our site, we can look at that behavior compared to other users who have done similar behavior and understand what percentage of those users ended up coming back and converting with us in the past to predict what the future is looking like. So it's like almost like a qualified visit before a qualified lead comes into place. And so you can get analytical with that data. There are view through conversions that you can use. And then I think lift testing is also really interesting if you have enough budget to be able to handle it. But we look at testing that out a number of different ways. I think the ebook was partially a way to kind of meet that customer a little bit earlier on in the the buyer's journey. I'm a little surprised we haven't seen more people build free tools over the last couple years or that like a snap app didn't take off and start making it easier for people to build calculators and those types of things.

But yeah, people do people use those things. That's the move. Tom Wentworth loves, loves talking about optimizely in their like test you Know, website like you can test the thing on your website. That still seems like the move if you have a software product. We had Natalie on from Novotic and she talked about interactive product demos. Yeah, that's a perfect example of like something that you like to talk about. This kind of mid funnel like. Yeah, it's not a demo, it's not a contact sales. We can show you more. They can be interactive and clickable. There's something there that I think is, I've been a long been an advocate of mainly because you go to a company's website and it's like the only options are get on the email list or contact sales.

Yeah, I mean I think those product demos are interesting. It seems like a really interesting space Novotic is in and I think it's really important for that kind of as PLG starts to is very popular in the enterprise sometimes. When I was at PLG companies it was challenging to get even enterprise folks to sign up for a demo because they didn't want to share their information, they didn't want to integrate any of their tools into the product. And so getting them to. So I think that's a really interesting space. I even. But I think like even before that it's like you don't want to pitch people on your product. You just want to kind of help them identify the pains that are getting them to your product. Right. So you want to improve your conversion rate. Here's a conversion rate calculator from Drift of how chat is going to help you improve the conversion rate on your site or, or something like that. Or at workable. We did the job descriptions. We allowed you to upload your job description. Then you posted a job. You already had a job description in place. And for a long time we were building calculators in Excel for people to be able to, you know, do what they were doing, but take a template of what they were trying to do, build it in Excel and then drive users into the product that way. And that was really successful. So the next iteration will be.

It's hard when you have multiple motions. Like eventually every company wants to scale and you move up market a little bit. And so I think marketing is easiest when it's just like, nope, all we want is this like free. We want to just get people into the free version of the product and then like let the product upgrade them to the next path. But then all of a sudden you're like, actually we have this idea for enterprise and this is going really well. So we're going to staple this on. And now marketing has to feed this like freemium funnel. And okay, now there's, you know, five BDRs and there's eight AES focus on enterprise and they need to be fed. Okay, then we got to do that. And then we got this mid market thing. We want to try to go after mid market. And then actually we really need to work on expansion. And you know, you had, you writ. You wrote something last, last week about marketing's role evolving over the course of your career.

And that was from an Exit 5 post.

Yeah, exactly. I know. Exit 5 shout out to you. Exit 5. Great job. But. But it is interesting. It's like marketing continues to own more like the, the lines of what marketing is continue to blur because marketing's got to work with product and sales and customer success and expansion. This. It's like marketing would be so much easier if like the only job was to do positioning and messaging. But then this whole thing would go back and we'd be like, well, marketing doesn't have a seat at the table anymore. It's like the gift. And the curse of this thing is that marketing can touch all those things. But it gets harder, hard inside of a company to define like what you should go do and go focus.

Yeah. Do you think marketing has slowly been eating sales without like, like if they have, they've been doing. We've been doing the best job at eating sales. Like sales was meant like early on. I mean, if you think about traditional B2B software, marketing was providing materials like sales enablement materials and helping get booth set up and providing the list. But now like so much of the research is done through marketing materials online before someone even talks to a sale to someone on the marketing team. So much of the decision has already been made before somebody even talks to a sales rep now that they're really more closers. Not introducing the relationship, building the relationship and closing it anymore.

Yeah, I think so. But I think of it as. I see marketing and sales as the same. The goal is just different. And I think when people hear sales, they, they, they mean like in your example, you mean sales people like a sales team. But ultimately, like, you know, slack grew through freemium through a freemium product with neither marketing nor sales. They had a good product, people used it, they adopted it with inside organization. It grew, they expand, they add on more. More stuff as you go. I think, yeah, marketing, you know, especially with the rise of content and all of these factors. Content, there's more content available. There's more information available. You can try Products for free. You can get Recommendations and reviews vs Like 20 years ago, marketing's job was to just get people who were somewhat in the right industry like to talk to them and then convince them that their thing is right. Right. That, yeah, that has all gone away. And so I don't see this question as like, are there going to be no more salespeople? No, I think that's a very valuable job and you're going to always need salespeople. But I think that inside of a company, like if I was a CEO, those two things need to have one shared goal and there's different ways of achieving that goal. I think where you get in trouble is when you, you pit them against each other and you're worried so much about this handoff and that handoff and who gets credit for this and who gets credit for that. I think it just reinforces like the company go to. Having a clear vision for how the company does go to market is more important than ever because there is so much ambiguity between marketing and sales. And then someone else out there is going to say, well, what about customer experience? Customer experience is so important. Why is nobody talking about that anymore? It's like, well, that's kind of all part of this customer experience marketing or is it sales? It's also a very good tool for sales. It's all ambiguous. The best team, the teams that are going to win, the teams that are doing well are when you have three or four cross functional leaders who just happen to be responsible for that team at the moment. Like a marketing person, a salesperson, a cs and they're all working together to serve the business. The business has goals. Okay, cool. This is my unit. We're going to be responsible for this stuff. This is your unit. We're going to be responsible for this stuff. That's always going to be best. Back to timeless type of lessons. Right?

But also going back to that, the thing that I come across less and less, like hardly ever. I can't think of it. I can't think of a time recently where I've come across this is like it used to be the VP of sales or the CRO. I don't even think CRO is a title then SVP of sales used to push marketing around. You'd always be like, oh, don't go to that company. Like the head of sales is a jerk. You know, oh, the head of sales understands marketing. There's. That feels like it was like 10 years ago the last time I was really having those conversations all the time with Actually, no, five to seven years ago. But like that has just been a constant shift throughout my career where you run into less and less of that. And it's driven by the alignment of marketing kind of perfecting a little bit what KPIs, it's going after how it reports itself. You don't hear even the salespeople anymore saying, oh, this like marketer doesn't like, you know, they're not accountable for metrics. Maybe you do, maybe you do. I just don't hear it as much. And I have a lot of conversations on a weekly basis with different people and it's never, oh, is your head of sales a jerk? Or like, are they easy to work with? That's not the conversation anymore. It's more, you know, we need to drive more pipeline. We need to figure out how to do it.

Yeah. I mean especially in this, in the sector of tech in the last two years and everybody got their budget cut and demand for. Nice to have products shrunk. I think the more that I've seen, it's actually sales and marketing don't matter at all.

Products eating, sales and marketing.

Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. And now, now marketing has to be involved in this. But like if I just used an example that I'm familiar with, which is Drift. Right. And I'm sorry that I always talk about it, but all we can do is like, it's like I talk about my kids all the time. Right. And that moment, like the three or four years like that I was there, that the company was really growing really fast. We had a great sales team. Yes. We had a great marketing team. Yes. It wasn't a specific tactic though. That was why. It wasn't because this handoff and this worked or we started blogging or this. It was because we had an amazing. The founders, David Elise had an amazing vision. They had a deep understanding of the market. They had a strong vision for what to build. The narrative matched. We got to go and execute on that. That is the 8020 in all of this stuff. And I look at, I've advised companies in this space. I've been around companies in this space. I see it all the time in questions from Exit 5. It's almost never a marketing tactic or sales tactic or those things happen. That's a symptom. Right.

But the root cause is marketing and sales at Drift out punted the coverage of the product. I think the marketing and sales and I was on the outside, so I.

Don'T know everything maybe functionality wise at the time. Sure.

Marketing and Sales team did a better job of promoting Growing Drift. Like, it was chat on a website. It wasn't like. You watch your mouth.

You watch your mouth. Yeah, no, no, it's fine. The. The. My NDA, everything's exploded. Everything's. We're good. But. No, no, no, what you're saying. You're making my point, though. You're making my point in that the reason the sales and marketing were good, though, is because the narrative, the strategy of the company was so good. Yes, it was. Maybe it was just chat, but nobody was. It was the realization that nobody was talking about this from a sales perspective and we're all using messaging in our personal lives. And why does B2B buying happen so slowly? Oh, my gosh. These. We can combine this into a really powerful story to tell. The reason about why Drift exists and why you need this product and why now.

But that.

And then sale.

The positioning.

It is. It is, but it's nothing without the. That it is. But the company exists.

But you're saying the product is eating marketing and sales.

No, sorry, I. I mean, the thing that you need to go and build, right, the narrative is like, because ultimately the point of the business is to have a product. You can't. You can't just have good marketing and good sales. You have to actually, oh, we delivered on this thing for. So I don't mean like, the actual, like, coding of the product and, like, is. It's. It's the. The positioning of the company, the product offering that we're going to create. And that doesn't just come from a product team meeting. That's not marketing. That is a strategic level. Like, you know, same way I want to have a strong conviction about what, like, I meant to. I want to build or buy a software product. Like, I want to have a strong conviction about why that product and the need for that and why it's the right fit for. For this audience. Like, those things are going to matter more than like, the. The funnel that we have and the handoff between this and that. That's the 80 20, I think. So, like, you know, it's. It's why somebody like April Dunford.

Okay. I mean, when I think of product leading, I think more of like a Slack or a Dropbox or something like that, where it was like this amazing product. People are sharing it all the time. It kind of drove its own growth. But I get that the narrative is really critical, and I think Drift was incredible. Like, even your company meetings were unbelievably orchestrated to get everybody on the same page from sales to product to marketing. And everybody was talking about it the right ways. It was like you guys handed out talking points every time somebody got off the elevator into the office. And, like, I think you all leveraged the network that you had built up from each individual employee across social and even, you know, I'm sure when people are at dinner parties, they were really excited to talk about drift and what you were working on. And that was incredible.

That comes back to the thing that we're creating. If we're like. And we're coming up with a new way to water your lawn, you know, you're like, okay. Like, it just happened to work with that. All of the ingredients lined up. And I just think this goes. Marketing has to be. It's only going to work if it's strategically involved in the business. And so many of the anonymous questions that we see in Exit 5, I'm like, all of the hard ones are like, well, the CEO, like, we haven't had a meeting with the CEO in three months. Sales. Sales team doesn't talk to us like, we're just. We're on an island. We have no clear metrics, no clear goals. Like, when everything is aligned from the beginning, when you have clear, you know, ownership and responsibility, that that's, that's where you're going to be successful. You know, cookies or not, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, we gotta wrap up. John, thanks for hanging. Good to see you, my friend.

Yeah, good to see you.

Thanks for the disclaimer. In the beginning. Yes, we are friends. We will continue to be friends.

Play golf sometime.

Let's play golf. Yeah, I'd love to. I, I, you know, I think. I don't think I made it down there last summer, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to make it your way. It's like.

But I can also come up to.

You Come up to me? Yes. That's. Now you're talking.

Come up to me or meet in the middle.

Meet in the middle. The only reason I said that is, you know, it's.

We're.

I'm way up in Vermont. It's like, you get another month. It's an hour if I go. If I go four hours south, like, you got golf, and you got to have something opening as soon.

All right. Hey, Dave, thanks for having me on.

Let's play some golf. See you, bud. All right. Thank you. Go see gm. Good luck. See you later.

Exit.

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