#39: Marketing when there's no urgency to buy, what the CEO wants, & driving predictable demand with John Short (Founder, Compound Growth Marketing)

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Exit. Okay. Hello. John Short is a friend of mine. Can you just really quickly tell the story about what you said when you called me the other Friday and we talked for the first time in three years and what happened?

Yeah, so this was, I think, the. One of the best things to ever happen to me. I think you've arrived. So I'm on the phone with Dave. We're catching up for the first time in, like, three years, and all of a sudden I hear, daddy, Daddy. I waved to you. I waved to you. And you said, oh, did you see me in through the window of your school bus? And then he goes, hey, John, gotta go, and hangs up on me immediately. Three years I haven't talked to you, but, like, that's the goal, right? It's all about getting back to the family, so.

But it was cool. No, I didn't even think of it like that. But, like, I think you and I have. Yeah, we haven't talked in three years, but we have a good enough relationship on a personal level, I think, where, you know, like, you knew that was, like, not a big deal and it was okay to hang up and I knew you'd text me later, but I looked at my phone later and you're like, I. You know, I just learned so much about you in that. In that moment, and that was cool. And I just wanted you to tell that because that meant a lot. That meant a lot to me. I'm like, okay, cool. That's good. I have a. That's the priority. I've just. I mean, I've seen it go the other way where you have to sacrifice. You and I talk about this a lot where, like, yeah, you build a great business, but you don't see your family and you. You know, I feel like you can have both. And I think one thing that you and I have always connected on is, like, is that line of thinking.

Yeah. We had an investor in one of our company, in one of the companies I was working at a couple of years ago, Brad Feld. And I remember he was talking to us, or I was reading the bio about him, and this guy's like, big time. Like, he invested. He's written a ton of books and had invested in the big Gaming, a couple of big gaming companies. He's had a lot of success. And he was like, no matter what happens, if somebody from my family calls, I like, leave the board meeting, whatever I'm doing, pick up the call to make sure I'm there for them. So I always thought that was cool. And then you and I have been talking about Tom Brady and how he's throwing away his family. They're not throwing away his family.

I don't know.

There's a lot to get into there. But like, the decision to play one to two more mediocre years of football rather than spend time with his family is just not what you and I are about.

Yeah, I haven't watched football in like five years. And I, I had to Google how.

Old is your daughter?

Right when she was born, like, I went from like full blown. Yeah, I went from full blown football addict. Like, I was in fit, you know, doing fantasy and like literally going, going to my friend's house for 10 hours on a Sunday and ordering food and watching Red Zone and like my fantasy football team was like the most important thing in my life. No joke. And now like, my neighbors will invite me over. My neighbor, like, invited me over to watch a Thursday night football game and I was like, no, because you gotta go. Like, I'm trying to build a relationship with my neighbors. But the game is on at. I go to bed at 9 o'. Clock. The game doesn't fucking kick off until 8:30. Okay. And then I gotta go and like, try to do small talk and pretend like I know what's going on in football. But yeah, I fell, I fell off so hard after like, my daughter was born. Just because, like, and this, I'm not judging anybody, if that's your thing. Like, I'm addicted to golf right now. Right? So this is not, not a commentary on like whether you're obsessed with football or not. However, for me it was just like I wanted to hang out with my, with my daughter and my wife and like, I just have a hard time. Like, I can't sit still for like 30 minutes anymore. And so I can't imagine like sitting on the couch for six hours and watching men who are younger than me play a sport. Anyway, there's, there's, this is like, I just is not important.

Not always younger than you. Right? And Tom Brady's.

Yeah, okay, well. But yeah, so, so to your point, like, did you got. How many you got six rings? Does he have six rings or seven?

Yeah, six.

He's six rings. Obviously. Like, bro, just Hang. Hang it up.

Yeah. And like to me, it's not just the, the wife. Right. It's the whole family situation.

Yeah. But John, who are we to judge? We don't know who. We don't.

Yeah, we don't know. Yeah. I've never been the goat.

All right, let's. Let's talk about, let's talk about B2B marketing.

That makes sense.

But the. Okay, so the way. So basically, long story short is John has been a marketing leader and people poo poo on the term expert. But in my mind, you are an expert in B2B SaaS and B2B marketing. John was at workable. Really. We almost joined our forces like at Drift back in the day. But John ended up going and starting his own agency where he now works with a lot of B2B SaaS companies on full funnel growth, SEO, SEM, content. And we've always just kind of jammed and gotten along because John kind of has this philosophy on like, you know, growth through expertise and content. Content led growth. And not just like the solution isn't just like, go spend a hundred grand a month on ads and generate a bunch of like, you know, shitty ebook downloads. And so I've gotten a lot out of working working with you and I'm lucky to be able to like bounce ideas off of you. And I started recommending that founders work with you. So that's our backstory. But maybe with that context and people can go look up your company. It's John Short and the company is compound growth marketing. So. So that tells you what he's about. Mine would be like flashy marketing dot com. John is compound growth marketing all social media tweets. Com. Elias that Drift would always just give me shit. Be like, what are you doing writing tweets right now? And I'm like, kind of. It's October. We'll put this out quickly. But it's October 2020. Obviously it's tough sledding out there for B2B SaaS companies. Like, what do you. What are you seeing? And then like, what. Where are you seeing people pull back and where should they be investing or how they're thinking about marketing right now? I just would like to hear your perspective.

Yeah. So I think especially over the last couple of weeks, I am lucky in that I have a portfolio of clients and I'm constantly talking to people in the market who work in B2B SaaS to understand what's going on in the industry. And I feel like we have started to see some pull back in the B2B space. I've seen a couple of layoffs happen over the past couple of weeks. I think companies continue to look for efficiency. So the nice to have longer term projects that take a little bit longer to play out are going to be tougher to get done over the next year. I think we're still seeing a lot of aggressiveness though in the industry. We're still seeing a lot of companies that are looking to make heavy investments and take the opportunity. But places where I'm seeing it slow down are investments in new technology, new marketing operations, technology expanding to new channels. And there's a lot of focus on the existing channels that they have.

The way, the way John said that was very nonchalant. But I think there's this really fucking important thing in there for people that are listening, excuse my language, in B2B SaaS. Most of the listeners to this are at B2B SaaS companies and a lot of them are selling sales and marketing technology. And what John said is like the reality check of what's happening right now, which is a lot of people are not buying new tech right now. Nobody's going to just go on LinkedIn or do whatever and say, but I can tell you that is the reason people are buying. People are not buying right now. And that can be very challenging from a what should we be doing in marketing standpoint. And I think that's what companies are up against a lot right now. And it's very hard to sit in those meetings as a marketing leader, exec team and just be like this is how the market is right now. But instead we just kind of like expect marketing, just like optimize the shit out and just make magic happen. But I was almost wrote this last night, but I didn't. But it's really hard to be a nice to have product right now. And I unfortunately, I think that changing the marketing company is not what makes you nice to have. It has to be a fundamental like product level discussion, you know?

Yeah, I think so. And I think the last 10 years really we've also learned, right, SAS came around. I don't know, I kind of date it Back to like HubSpot Log in Salesforce. Since that period of time. There was a period we went through like five to ten years ago where we were like, we're going to get the software, you know, we're going to enter in our email address, enter in a password and boom, it's all sudden going to start working for us. And over the last couple of years I think We've seen a lot of companies invest more resources in operations in order to get that software stood up. So if you're working in house and you're looking to get buy in on getting more software, I think going to the economic buyer in your organization, whether it's the CEO or the cfo, and having a plan to show if you want to get new software and it might be seen as a nice to have. I think one of the keys is showing how quickly you can get that set up and how much it's going to cost you. And then if you're the company that's selling it. Yeah, it's tough to be in the nice to have category. You're not going to be able to, you need the, the nice to have ness needs to leave and become a necessary product and that has to be led by the product team, by the CEO and by understanding what the needs are of your customers in that industry. And that's so cliche. To say is like you need to understand your customer but like understanding the true value of your product is critical.

Yeah, that's great. I mean, and it's tough, it's tough to like sit and figure out how to ride that out because it's like what if you're nice to have now but if buying comes back in six months anyway, might be a good opportunity. The hard part is there's, it's times like this when you realize what the fluff is and you have to, you, you might have to cut it in order to know what would you be doing. If you're in a B2B SaaS company right now and you're just natural buying is slowing down and maybe the CEO is not pushing so hard to drive revenue right now because it's like, okay, look, it's going to be kind of shitty for the next two quarters. What type of marketing stuff would you be working on? So maybe you just lost 50k, 100k in budget, a month in marketing on ad spend, you still got to do something. What are the things that you think you'd be focusing on if there's not urgency to buy?

Yeah. So I think what we're going to see is kind of companies move back into focusing on direct response. And I'm already seeing that like the cfo, the CEO, they aren't paying as much attention to awareness type programs or they aren't as big a believer as if you're not able to track it. And that's just the unfortunate truth. So If I'm in B2B marketing in house. I'm looking for ways to start to prove out some of the organic campaigns I'm running on LinkedIn. Show some of the lift that we're seeing from paid acquisition campaigns that aren't necessarily completely driven by somebody clicking through and looking to purchase, but they are having a big impact on building awareness and getting people ultimately into your funnel. So I think the unfortunate thing is we'll see the market revert a little bit to people who, to, you know, focusing spend and direct response like Google Ads and SEO and other places where, where it's easy to measure. And we're going to see a little bit more hesitancy to focus on those like more demand creation type channels. The second thing, and I wrote a post about this today on LinkedIn. I think you need to focus on giving your salespeople something to talk about. And this is what you all did such a great job at. Drift. I was trying to think about this the other day. Were you looking to launch a new product every week or was it every month?

It felt like every week, but it was every, it was every month we, we did something that we called marketable. They were called marketable moments. They were on the calendar. Like it was a thing that the first Tuesday of every month we are doing a launch. And so I don't know, like right now it's October. I don't know what the December or January launch is, but I know that the CEO and others around the company have this expectation that that's when we're doing it.

Yeah.

And that was huge for a bunch of different reasons. Number one, it drove like the discipline of like we're working on a campaign every month. I think number two, it gave us this like perception in the market that we were everywhere because we were always doing new and interesting things. So some months it might be a product launch, some months it might be a book, another month it might be a research report, another month it might be event. It's not always a thing, but it's always felt like a big, it always felt like a big drop. And if you were go look back at the spikes in pipeline and website traffic, kind of all the metrics, it was always like there was a spike around that marketable moment. And we had initially done them towards the end of the month but we were noticing that that wasn't giving, that wasn't helping the sales team in a way because it's like towards the end of the month they're in the close motion. Right. They had almost a 30 day sales cycle. And so it'd be like the beginning of creating a ton of pipeline. Towards the end of the month, they shift to closing it. And so, like, we ended up moving it forward to the first Tuesday of every month. And so we kind of gave some momentum to carry us in, into the month. And to your point about giving sales something to talk about, not only did it drive traffic and create social buzz and, you know, that type of stuff, but it gave sales a reason to go. Reach out to John, other than like, hello, John, you're in my nurture sequence. And it's like some of the best reps at Drift at that time were not even trying to sell you something. They'd be like, john, are you around next week? Here's two free tickets to this event for your team. Or, John, here's a new book we launched. Here's a copy of that. Or, John, did you know that our. Our head of marketing is doing this podcast and they had this huge guest on here. Here's the link to the episode. It was like, it was things like that that I think work worked really well.

Yeah. So giving your sales team something to talk about, because I see this in my position, I don't think every company necessarily knows that their budget is slowing down, but their CFO is slow rolling them right now. Like, even the decision makers down the organization, they're slow rolling that person. Or you're just seeing deals take a little bit longer than they used to. So giving your sales team something to reach out, be useful, continue to build that trust, it changes the dynamic of the whole relationship. We love to dunk on. On Twitter and LinkedIn, the emails we get from the reps that are coming out. But I think in a lot of ways that's on marketing, to not give them anything to reach out to you about. Like, if they're saying, hey, John, I noticed the weather in insert, Your town is 68 degrees today. That's an actual email I've gotten and I'd love to get on the phone with you or hey, let me buy you a coffee and talk to you. Like, that person has nothing interesting to say about their company. So they have to give. Send me a Starbucks gift certificate in order to get on the phone with me. Like, give your team something to talk about during these times.

Oh, my gosh, I'm trying to find this one because I got. I got one recently that was so bad. It was one of those, like, not to dunk because we just said don't dunk. But it was like one of Those like, you know, did the file cabinet fall on you? Type things. But I'll find it later. I think like, yeah, giving, giving the sales team something to actually talk about. The other thing, I was going to go with you on this. If they cut the budget, like they cut 50 grand, 50 grand a month in paid, right? And you lost an agency or two or this vendor or whatever, Right. To me the fun part about marketing is like, what resources do we have right now? Okay, we only have these six people. We don't have paid budget to spend it on. Like, I think sometimes people like why we make bad decisions because we have all the options. But it's almost like when you don't have. So it's just like, it's me, John, a video person and a designer and we have no budget. Well, fuck, what are we going to do? Like, to me, that's the fun of marketing and like, that's the stuff that I love. And so it's like the teams that can be creative and like think about that and like not where everything is becomes a social stressful. Like, man, we don't have any budget. We don't even have any team. Is there a way where you can flip it and turn it into a positive thing? So like, what is the cool thing? What's the thing that like the four of us could do or the three resources you do have? Right. Like, I love, I love that type of stuff. And so I just want to like push people to try to think like that. As said easily by the guy who's not under pressure at a SaaS company right now.

But yeah, but it's the back against the wall. And I think that the cycles in the economy are. I always compare it to the rate like the, the forest fires that happen out west where the whole forest gets burned down and like that's your gigantic budget. And then it creates new opportunities for new channels, new things to come out of the literal ashes of what's happening. But these, these are the times when great companies are built because they understand how to do it when their backs up against the wall and they don't have all the budget in place. So we tend to see a lot of innovation and marketing and in product when budgets start to tighten a little bit.

Well, like if you're the company that just had that budget cut, like, maybe now's the time to be like, all right, we're going to go all in on LinkedIn organic and we're going to use like the founders page and one other page and we're going to like, nobody in our niche, nobody in our industry is like, has interesting things to say or is entertaining or funny or educational in this niche. We're going to go hard on LinkedIn in the next three months. Then maybe like the economy comes back and you get your budget back and now all of a sudden you've built this new channel that you can use to further amplify things. I think if you can think like that, that's how you're going to not only just continue to make progress at work, but I think like personally, like.

Develop your career as a, as a.

Leader and you know, now's the time to go try those new things, I guess, right?

Yeah. And I would write all those like I have a spreadsheet whenever I join a company where I write down every possible channel, every possible kind of strategy that you could execute and then I.

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Go check them out, Go in and next to them based on the company that I work at. So it's like, you know, outbound email, Google Ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, organic LinkedIn podcast, newsletter, all those things. Write them down and then just kind of hypothesize what you think the upside is of those, what the upside is for those different markets, how much budget it requires, and then what you think, like how confident you are in the impact. And that sounds like a stupid exercise or it sounds really easy, but just mapping that all out, putting it all on paper in front of you helps you. And then that's also something you can take to the CEO of the company to say, hey, look, our back's against the wall. Here's what we put together. Here's our hypothesis on why these channels don't work. And they may come back to you and say, you know, I hate this idea. Our customers aren't on Twitter, our customers aren't on LinkedIn, which is always my favorite one. It just helps you to kind of get on the same page with that CEO too. You may disagree with them and a lot of time is wasted by marketers when they don't get buy in from a CEO, but they still complain that the CEO won't invest in those areas. But at least you're getting on the same page and at least they're seeing your thought process for where you think you should invest. Yeah, you're on the same page. And it's also what you just said.

There is like the most important thing, I think, like to your point, people thinking like this is a silly exercise or whatever, but I think you have to be able to articulate, like, what your marketing strategy is, not just to the marketing team, but to the cfo, to the head of sales. And so like, that framework is awesome because then it allows you to be like, hey, look, Todd, look, let me take you through our marketing strategy. Like, yes, there's lots of things we could be doing. Actually, we've mapped them all out and we rank them all based on. Because, like, I'm assuming in that world you're kind rank also the things like, well, which, which things could we be naturally successful at? Like, and for one of the things I was like, at Drift, for example, I had done a podcast before and at my last job at HubSpot. And so like us betting on a podcast as an early channel for the company wasn't. It was like, we looked around. It's like, nobody in this niche has one right now, and we kind of know how to do this. Okay, I like that. Well, I like that idea a little bit more than X. Right. And so you have to look where, like, where you can be successful. But I think that allows you to operate from a position of power where you're like, look, we've, we've evaluated all the channels because you have field all these questions. You're like, the CEO wants to know why you're not testing LinkedIn paid. The VP of Sales wants to know why you're not sponsoring Saster. And like, right. You know, the lesson I wish I knew then was like, yeah, you just get in this. I would get so defensive about all these things versus if you, if you're like, well, look, we've evaluated all the channels. Right now we're not. Because we're focusing on X, Y and Z, then people are okay, and they kind of like, leave you alone a little bit with like the all, like the why don't we do X thing, you know?

Right. It sets you up perfectly for those conversations as they will inevitably come in even after you present that the head of sales is still going to forget or they're still going to push. And it's better to be open with those conversations with the head of sales to say, hey, here's why we don't think it's a good idea then just to write it off and kind of, you know, let silence kind of kill your relationship with them.

Do you have a framework, like, now that you have your, your kind of agency and you, you work with a bunch of similar companies in a similar capacity, do you have like a framework that you think about that you kind of like, want to see companies operate from when it comes to marketing.

Yeah. So we have developed our own kind of system, the predictable demand system. And typically we're looking at that kind of exercise that we just talked about, and sometimes we'll add additional columns. I think you make a great point that I'm going to take back, which is, you know, potentially giving each channel some type of ranking in terms of how crowded the market is. So, like, if you see all your competitors are having podcasts or your competitors rank really well on SEO, it may not be the right place for you to go. And then also, like, where we start is looking inside the data, inside the CRM, inside the marketing automation system, to understand where the best customers are coming from. So use that intelligence to understand who the best customers are and also where your best customers are coming from. So that, again, is another great exercise to be looking at right now to kind of make sure your money is being spent in the most efficient places. It's not about the leads or the marketing qualified leads. I'd look further down at the funnel to look at what industries, what segments of your database are moving through the sales cycle most efficiently, which means the fastest and converting the best, and also which ones drive the most customer lifetime value for your business and take the insights that you can from there to really narrow in on those audiences, where those best customers are coming from.

Where do you see, like, offers in your. In this idea of predictable demand?

You mean like the. The funnels were moving down?

Yeah. I just would like to hear you talk about the funnel a little bit for people.

Yeah. So in SaaS, I started out at Logman, and so Logman was a freemium company. And when I was there was when, like, HubSpot was coming up and was really big on ebooks. And I remember during the interview process, I pitched the VP of marketing. I was like, you know, I'd been re. I was drinking the HubSpot Kool Aid, and I was like, well, like, if I wanted to build a case for why we should drive someone to a landing page with an ebook on it, like, would I be able to do that here? I don't know if that's exactly what I asked, but I was young and she was like, sure, but we're driving people into the product. And like, I didn't realize. And then I joined LogMeIn and completely took for granted that we were 100% focused on all our marketing efforts on really high intent leads, demos, or trials. And again, I want to set the backdrop. This is during the time when HubSpot was really pushing the content marketing playbook where you drive leads in three ebooks. So I've always felt like those top of funnel ebooks, just to get leads in the door, don't provide a lot of value. And you want to figure out the ways that you can push leads down funnel as best you can to drive demo requests, pricing requests, and trials. But where I hope you're going with this is like the middle intent funnel, which is like the test drive that we worked on when you were with.

Yeah, because I think one of the. You know, I think one of the areas where companies struggle the most is to drive high intent leads. And there's. There's many people that. That talk about that. I think Chris Walker is one of them.

His stuff is great.

We talk about it in exit 5 a lot. I think where a lot of people struggle, though, is like, okay, I get it. I need to drive higher intent leads. How do I do that? Because, like, you know, that part is easy. You got people coming to your website saying, I've heard of you, and I would like to talk to sales. Fantastic. No shit. VP of sales wants more of those. But I think it's, at least in the marketing teams that I know and I've worked with, in my experience, it's harder to understand how to move that.

Yeah. So there are a couple of questions in there, because I want to get to Test Drive, because I thought that was something interesting that you had worked.

Yeah. Go back and set context for what you're talking about, too.

Yeah. So Test Drive was a concept. Like, one of my first clients coming out of working in house was Drift. I think one of the first weeks that I joined, you all had developed a funnel for users who didn't want to start a trial with your product. You guys didn't want to do ebooks. You didn't want to do the HubSpot playbook at all. Even though a lot of you had come from HubSpot, you wanted everything to be a trial or a demo, which is.

Yeah, let me tell you. I'll tell you. I'll tell you the challenge. Yeah, I'll tell you the exact challenge. So we had a business that had grown primarily through free users. And so there was thousands of people that would sign up. They'd use the free version. Sales would talk to them. Great. Eventually, though, we hit that inflection point of we want to go sell to bigger companies. We want to grow that. Because it's like if you're growing the freemium low end, you know, $30 a month business, that's a simpler business. You just, you find ways to grow website traffic. Website traffic grows, you get more, more trial signups. The problem is we started to sell to more complex companies and the typical buyer was not going to go to the website, get the free version, put the free version on their website based on what the use case of the product was. Maybe for Slack it would work differently, but it's, it was a chat, it's a chat widget on. Right. And so very few like legitimate enterprise level companies are going to get a free version of it, slap it on the website and be like, yeah, this is good, let's use it. And so we were kind of up against this. Like that was hard to, we could grow that. But it wasn't the right number of people. The right people. And sales was so used to selling to that motion. We need to. But, but then the gap between like content was too big and so we're like, is there a middle of the funnel type offer where people could like get a taste for this thing then be in a better position to talk to sales?

Yeah. So that mid intent funnel and that was brilliant because I think first we started retargeting people to it. So we'd see people who started conversation on Drift but didn't share their email, or people who came in, they navigated around the site, looked at some of the product pages but didn't want to, didn't end up starting a trial or did not end up engaging in drifting. And that was just like easy boom. Come in here, take a look at what it would look like on your website, get an idea of how this thing works. And the beauty of it was the whole product was built off of an initiated chat experience. So they were getting to experience the product from their side where they were getting to engage with the bot and understand what the capabilities were. And then they were also able to see what it looked like on the website. And the amount of ways that we were able to leverage that through ppc, SEO and paid search was tremendous. I think it got really, really strong roi.

You did something. Can you talk about what you had done at Workable? Because I think it's also, it's related where basically just talk about the organic kind of moat that you built.

We want to think about how we create momentum at the top of the funnel to drive down funnel conversion. So at workable we had two years before I started, there were 150 job descriptions that an intern wrote and put them up on the site after the first month those job descriptions were on the site, they drove like 100 visitors. And so they didn't have the patience for it. And they just said, forget about this. Cut to. When I joined, I had kind of worked with HR company previously and was thinking about the buyer's journey and just thinking about all the different inflection points that happen to someone before they are looking to post a job online. So the first one that stood out in my mind was job descriptions. Somebody who's about to post a job is going to go to Google and look for a job description. And so I found out that this intern had created all these 150 job descriptions. Two years ago when I went into Google Analytics, I saw that none of those job descriptions were driving a ton of traffic on their own. But in total they were driving about 25,000 visits a month. And so in order to capture more of the traffic from those users, we built a funnel from the job descriptions where they could go take a look at the job description. They were at that point copying and pasting it. But what we did was we said, we created a call to action that said, post this job Description out to 15 plus job boards. Click here to start a trial. You click on it, you'd go to an editable format of the job descriptions that you could of that job description so you can make changes and personalize it for your company. And then you started the trial from there. And the beauty of that was we saw that users who signed up for a trial had like a 10% conversion rate, which is great. Users who came in, started a trial and then posted a job converted out like 30%. And then users who came in, posted a job and got 10 plus candidates would convert like 75% of the time. So the way we had users entering our product was setting them up so they already had a job posted and we're likely to get even more candidates from there. So yeah, I think that's another good example of how you can take one intent that somebody has and turn it into like down funnel velocity in order to make them better leads.

How do you think about coming up with those types of offers? Because I feel like a lot of what your approach is, is rooted in this type of thinking where you basically go back to who are you trying to sell to and you kind of map the different pain points and questions that you have and create content. Can you, can you share your philosophy on? I think you know where I'm trying to go with that.

Yeah. So I build out a buyer's journey for the user.

So and this is like one of the first things that you do, right?

Yeah, that's one of the first things I do. In general. It's usually like I create a spreadsheet with four columns in them, one for awareness, the other for pain, and the other for in market users. In the case of Workable, which I think is a slightly better example, we had a workflow inside the tool that looked just like lifecycle stages inside of a CRM. You'd have sourced candidates, you'd have a bucket for source candidates, you'd have a bucket for candidates who had applied, you had a bucket for people who are going through a phone interview, then an interview and then the offer stage. I basically just took a screenshot of that, put it into a presentation and then mapped all the different types of content we could create for each stage in that hiring process. So before candidates were sourced, we had people would be looking for job descriptions while candidates were being sourced. We had information for how to recruit people on LinkedIn. We even did one for Snapchat which was really interesting and got a ton of traffic of a lot of people are looking for how to recruit on Snapchat. And then we had during the phone interview and the interview stage, we created interview questions. We created a lot of content around developing the interview process. And so that was kind of of our foundation. But behind that is I call it inflection points for companies. What's going on at that company that's going to lead them to need to use your product. And so in a lot of the companies that I've worked with previously that are in the marketing and sales space, a company that raises $30 million in a series B round, we know they're about to scale up their sales team. So they're going to be looking for sales operations tools and marketing operations tools in order to help that, you know, I see your dog on the couch behind you. I often think about this like, you know, somebody who gets a dog is likely then going to want to install a fence in their yard or install an invisible fence. So thinking about all the things that are happening in the background that then are going to lead to someone becoming in market and thinking about their intent.

I love that analogy, like just simplified things like this is marketing, right? What is that in your world? And I like how in the workable example, the stages a customer goes through to hire someone is equally as important to know as your made up internal funnel stages. Right, that's equally as important. So when you're talking about this stuff though. Like, so you, you do this exercise and you, you. I think a lot of people then just get paralyzed though, because it's like, wait a second, I just made a list of a hundred, a hundred articles that I, that I need to create. Like, how do you think about the actual, like, execution? What should the execution of those things be?

Yeah, so our prioritization comes from talking to the customer and hearing about, like, hearing how often these challenges come up for them. We're also looking at keyword research a lot of times as a signal of how much demand there is in the market for certain things. So like we'd go to Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner and look at how many people are searching for interview process or interview questions. And so we use all of those things. And then finally the third one is gut, which is my least favorite because I'm data driven. So we look for all the different signals that we can find that tell us how popular will a certain piece of content be, Sometimes also using proprietary data. And then in that case, because it was largely SEO driven, we were able to see when we did all the keyword research where the pockets were, where there was the most search. So how many people are looking for job descriptions by job title? How many people are looking for interview questions? How well, like hypothesis, how well do we think users are going to convert to our product when they come in through interview questions versus job descriptions? But again, it goes back to what I was talking about earlier. You map it all out, you identify the criteria that you can find and then you got to make some gut decisions or some hypothesis on what the potential impact is going to be and how difficult is it is going to be to make.

What's your opinion on measurement? Because a lot of, a lot of the things that you're suggesting lead to content, might lead to a new pillar page on a website. I want direct response, easy to measure, pipeline driven from that page. John. But that's not the reality of it. How do you measure the impact of some of those things? I guess with SEO and SEM, it's easy. But also the content of those pages is also not necessarily direct response driven. It might be, here's something about your job or your role that's interesting content, but it's kind of also like not a direct connection. You don't just like serve up like a, hey, do you want to get a demo on that content and have it convert? Right.

Yeah. And those things like SEO, ppc, that's an experience. Even display ads, you need to think about the experience as it starts on the place where they're coming from. So when somebody is looking for a job description then they come to your site, what are they going to want next? Like in that case? Yeah, they're going to want to be able to post that job out. In terms of measurement, especially for SEO, I like, I think if you look at first touch attribution and just understand what got people into your ecosystem, what got them to first come to your site, I think that will be a lot better because a lot of people would come in through the job descriptions, they'd have that job description, they wouldn't be ready to post the job yet and then they'd come back in through retargeting or because they saw our ads and were reminded of us.

So do you look at like website just like any content, like hey, do you look at like the number of website engagements somebody would have before they book a meeting? Do you look at that stuff?

Yeah, we live in a world of considered purchases so we want to understand all the different content people are looking for before they end up converting or doing the down funnel conversion. So did that answer your question?

Yeah. What do you think about self reported attribution?

It's a great way to get a better understanding of some of the things that really stood out in your customers minds. So I think it can be really useful there. Over the last four years since I've worked, since I've started working in sales, I can hear in the conversations that I'm having how people found out about us, like why they're looking for us, what's going on at those companies, like they will often tell me. So I think it's more interesting to collect that information through your SDRs and your AES. They are a great source of inspiration because they can tell the excitement and tone of people when they're talking to them about how they found out about a company. I think it tends to give more attribution to some of the stuff that is going to drive more recall, which is really important to understand. But it might limit the amount of value you put into something like Google Ads like non branded search where they're not necessarily always going to admit that they went to Google and search for marketing automation software or something like that. So I do think there are downsides but it's a great tool to have in your tool set.

Well, I think it's like, it's like you're just supposed to use all these things and like triangulate like right. You know, marketing attribution doesn't tell you what to go.

What to go do.

It's not like a formula, although soon it will be. With AI, you just plug it in. It does your marketing for you. But I think that that's like a. You hear what the sales team is saying, you see what you're saying through software attribution, you see what self report attribution is saying. And then still, ultimately you're making a bet. And so for you, like, as the founder of an agency, you're like, okay, I feel like based on what I'm hearing, we're going to go do more of this to get new customers. Right. That's ultimately, you still have to, like, place a bet.

Right. It's. Triangulation is the best way to say it. It's not. There's no one source that can drive 100% of your decision making. And that's a good thing. It's going to slow down how quickly AI replaces us as marketers.

Yeah. I tweeted the other day, which is my. Which is a joke. I wasn't like, talking bad about any of the tools. I think they can be really useful. But I said it was more of a reflection on me as a copy. As a writer. I'm like, there's no AI tool that will replace my complete disregard for grammar and facts.

That's going to be how we know.

It's scary. It's scary. If you've heard the Joe Rogan, Steve Jobs stuff, it's scary because lots of people are going to. The fraud and framing. Making shit up about people is going to get really scary.

Yeah.

Anyway, that's a whole side rant. Okay, John, we'll have you come back in two weeks and I think we'll make this a recurring thing because I want to keep talking to you for an hour, but you. You got bills to pay, so. And I got bills to pay, too, so we got to go.

All right, sounds good. Thank you for having me on.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the Exit 5 podcast.

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