Measuring The Effectiveness of Marketing and Predicting Revenue

Great ideas and a great value prop and a great offer is what's going to solve your growth problems. And so I say that to every customer, like don't come to us and say like we're going to solve and somehow I, you know, magically identify a 10x growth idea. That's not how measurement works.

I think you're right. And I'm saying this because I'm strongly on the other side, which is like if you could have two marketers, you could have the Dave marketer. Lots of ideas, momentum, speed, we're shipping things, we're doing things, we're getting attention, we're growing awareness. Right, that's going to bring in new customers is faster than the other bucket, which is like, hold on, hold on. Before we do anything, we need to make sure we can measure this. However, I do think that the best place is to meet is to marry the two things together and, and meet in the middle. And like even now I've said if I were to ever go be like a CMO somewhere else or, or go do a new startup or whatever or I guess now even with Exit 5, like coming up with the ideas is not going to be the issue. Exit.

Foreign.

So Pranav is here and I guess, I guess we can break, we're breaking the rules and we're having a CEO on the, on the podcast. But.

I, I still, I still don't know if I would call myself a CEO yet. It feel like it's a three person startup. Like, you know, oh well, you got.

You have me beat. I promoted myself a month ago to CEO and it's great, it's great with all, all of the employees and everything. All right, so but you're building, you're building a company. I saw some, I saw Kyle Lacy came on as an advisor. I saw a bunch of other things going on around the company. So before we, I want to talk to you about your background a little bit, but let's, let's start with Powermark actually. So right now you're the co founder and CEO of Paramark. What is Paramark?

Yeah, great question. So we help CMOs with marketing measurement, experimentation and forecasting. Now we started this journey to help marketers and always be on the side of the marketers. And that's really important to me. I've been in the shoes of ABPF marketing and you know, individual sort of contributor as a marketer and really just felt that there wasn't enough in the software space that was truly sort of helping scale the impact that marketing can have marketing is underutilized, you know, misunderstood, sidelined. And we want to change all of that with Powermark. So happy to talk to you more about that. But that's, you know, and a very, very sort of high level marketing measurement for fast growing businesses.

What was it that led you to want to go start this? Because you've been ahead of marketing in B2B SaaS usually. I mean I wrote a book on this topic called founder brand where like usually this, the founder of a startup started the company, you know, not because they were just, you know, sitting around the house being like, I, I should start a company, what should that company should be about? But usually it's because there's some problem that keeps coming up over and over. And you know, if I, if anybody goes to your LinkedIn and they see, you know, Dropbox, magento pilot.com, bill.com now you're starting a measurement company. What, what led you to here? What were the frustrations as a marketer?

Yeah, totally. You know, I'm, I'm a, I would call myself a reformed marketer. And what that means is I used to judge marketing from the outside. I was a product manager for a long time. I was a growth practitioner for a long time. And I used to always look at marketing and be like, well, you know, what do those people do? What do they do? And like, you know, why isn't it driving more business? And so on and so forth. And so I was a little bit arrogant, I think about, you know, I could do a bunch of things in marketing that marketers aren't doing. And I finally got into marketing and I realized how hard that job is and how misunderstood it is.

Wait, so was this when you were, was this like a, was this like a PM Growth, Growth guy kind of mindset?

Totally. Right? You can measure everything. You can, you know, like, of course you can like track everything. Like what is this marketing thing? Like they should be able to do it. And you know, this is, this is like early on in my career I hadn't really studied, like you always say, right? Like nobody goes to school for marketing, B2B marketing. And I hadn't really sort of understood the basics of marketing. So when I got in the job the first time, it was out of arrogance. And then I got my, you know, my butt kicked a little bit by just the reality of how hard it is to do good marketing. And as I kind of did that both as a growth practitioner, but then also as a marketing professional, I realized that the state of software in Marketing is still quite bad. I want to let that sit there and say, you know, the salespeople, product people, engineering people, finance people have really good software supporting them. And when I look at marketing, yes, we all see the 11,000 apps and all that fun stuff, but there's a lot of just mediocre software. And when I started thinking about what I wanted to do next after Bill, I spent some time just thinking about, okay, what are the different ways in which we can make marketers lives easier? And talked to a bunch of people, spent like six months talking to VPs of marketing and CMOs. And this question of ROI and attribution and measurement kept coming back up again and again. That was not the original sort of intent or idea that I wanted to work on, but we pivoted into it because of just the sheer pain that we felt very viscerally from our initial sort of, you know, audience. And I thought about it myself, like yeah, it's, it's actually pretty bad. Like I never had good software to solve that, that problem.

So, so before, before I called this, before I called this whole operation Exit five, I had a, the first like three years ago, the, the version of this podcast was called B2B Marketing Leaders. And I would interview CMOs and I would ask them very like, kind of like I came up with 20 questions and I'd ask them all specifically. And one of the questions that I asked at the end was always if you could wave a magic wand or like what' would solve. And almost all of them said attribution right Y. And so I agree with you completely and I'm not trying to poke holes in your, in your argument. I'm just trying to like build, build the case here. Like maybe we can figure out why. Okay, but so we all agree that that's a big issue and yet there is however many. I don't know what Scott Brinker's like Martech landscape. I, I stopped at 10,000, it's maybe 20,000. There's 20,000 martech tools or whatever it is today. And then there's companies that have, that have tried, that have done this. Like I. People loved Bisible as an example, you had some time at Adobe, so I'm sure you're familiar with them. Why has nobody solved this? There's 12,000 tools, but one doesn't exist. Like what's, what's missing in getting to the answer here, do you think?

Yeah, I think it's a couple of really interesting things that have happened over the last couple of decades. So since the advent of search advertising, social media advertising. You look at Google and Facebook and all the others that have come about, there was this idea that you can track clicks and touches and view throughs through all of these digital platforms and you're going to get this very deterministic, this person did this thing, clicked on this ad and therefore they are. We give all the credits to that Google search ad or that Facebook ad. And in reality, marketing doesn't work like that. And so I think that pretty much all software vendors who have tried to approach this have tried to take this view that you can get very deterministic. Like I can tell you which ad contributes to like Pipeline. And our view is that that is not how marketing works. You have to have multiple parts of the journey, multiple parts of the story that have to all come together. And you can't look at one specific ad, one specific email, one specific blog post and try to attribute credit that way. That's just a failing proposition. And software vendors have never been able to look at that from first principles and build software around that. And that's the downfall. Now there are some people who are doing it right. And funnily enough, the technology and the methodology that we're using is not new. It's actually pretty old. It's existed since the 70s and the 80s and using statistics and advanced math and probabilities to understand the correlation and causation between all your media spend and your sales numbers. But it became a lost art because everyone thought that, oh, we're going to be able to track every single touch point and that's just not happening. And it's getting worse because of all the privacy changes. Right. I don't know if you heard this one. Recently, Apple has started to strip out UTM codes from Apple mail and Apple messages. So good luck. If you're relying on UTM codes, like.

Good luck, I just delete them all out anyway. I don't like how they look.

Exactly. Same here. Same here.

I read this book once, it's called Insanely simple and it's about Steve Jobs and Apple and just his. I don't know if it was in this book. I'm confli. May have put it together a bunch of things, but I think with like TV commercials, the marketing team or whoever, the agency would always be like, you know, we need to, we need to come up with like a URL so we can track this. And he's like, track these. Like we're going to know how we, you know, we're going to know if it works. The URL is apple.com and I've always thought about that. And even just in growing something small like exit 5, we know where, we know where the, we know where the growth comes from. We, we can tell. And then, you know, analytics, obviously you're starting something new, but the analytics platforms have gotten good enough where we know referral traffic from this source or that source, or social. And then the thing that has always felt broken to me, and this is granted, I, I didn't come up through like, you know, hardcore demand gen or conversion marketing, but the measurement thing always is broken to me because the measurement assumes that the market B2B marketing is not direct response marketing. There are some things that are direct response. And so the direct response channels are easy to measure, right? Search, SEO. Right. But so much of what, of what works in B2B marketing is not direct response. And then, so then fundamentally like the whole way you're going to measure that is broken. And even on the direct response channels, right, Someone might convert on a search ad, but then they might hear you on a podcast and go see you at an event and then, you know, three months later get an intro from a VC and they hear your tool is great. And then they're in exit 5 and someone recommends it and that's why they buy. And then your analytics is going to say search. So there, there's so much in there when it comes to B2B specifically with bigger, you know, bigger deal sizes, longer sales cycles, that yeah, the, the whole.

Measurement thing is you're 100% right, you're 100% right. And this is the, the problem that like you said, direct response channels have this attribute that they seem, that they're easy to measure, right? You can like see the clicks in real time. And so there's a vicious cycle that you only invest in those direct response channels. And what's happening there, if you think about it, everyone's bidding on the same keywords, everyone's competing for the same direct response, bottom of the funnel stuff and gets more expensive every year. And it's just like there's no way to break out of that if you don't think creatively about all the other ways in which you could be doing marketing. And this is the hard part, that stuff is hard to measure. And what I would argue is it's not actually hard to measure. And there's methodologies to measure all of those things. People have been doing this for ages.

You look at, okay, let's talk about that. So how do we, how do instead of, instead of, instead of two people. Like, which is my, this is my, that's all my whole brand of two people ranting about how things are impossible to measure. I'm fortunate enough have somebody who's smart enough to be figuring this out. So let, what is that method? What is that methodology? How, how, how should you be thinking about it? Because look, no, it's, I, I like to rail on this. I would also, and I like to say I'm, I'm the creative type. I don't want to measure everything. But like, don't get me wrong, if I could measure everything and it was easy, I, I would love to do that. So what is the methodology? How do we get there?

Love it. Okay, so let's get into it. Step number one, you gotta know what is the thing that you're trying to optimize for? And Almost everybody in B2B says revenue pipeline. Like duh. Well, yeah, that's why you have a business, right? You're going to optimize through a revenue like. Yeah, but marketing and sales are not the same thing. Marketing is inherently different. And you have to have ways of measuring the right metrics in marketing that are leading indicators of that eventual revenue, but also move in real time in fairly quick succession of any marketing investment that you're making. So that's step one. And that answer is not going to be a cookie cutter answer. It might be different for every business depending on your sales cycles, depending on the acv, depending on the different sort of go to market motions, PLG to sales led to marketing led, 15 day trials to 3 month pilots. Your marketing metric is going to be different. That's number one. If you get that wrong, everything else in your measurement plan is not going to work.

And so is that. Do you, do you think about that like on a channel basis like, hey, I'm starting a podcast.

I'll take a great example, right? For you all, it's probably two things. It's probably your community members, right? That's probably a metric that you care about the most and there is some amount of memberships and maybe now that you're starting to do some, you know, sponsorships and stuff like that is probably some amount of, you know, pipeline or number of, you know, leads or whatever it is for, you know, that side of the business. So it's two or three very basic things.

Yeah, you got it, you got it. It's, it's those, it's those two. It's like the subscriptions and then sponsors. Those are the two Big metrics. But where I get stuck is there's lots of other little, there's lots of other little metrics that, that matter in there. And so one hypothesis is like, well, if there's 3,000 members, how is it possible that we only have 14,000 people on our email list? Like that, that, that seems really low. And so a hypothesis is I really want to grow the email list this year and I think we should have an email list of 30, 40, 50,000 people. And so I don't, I don't have a perfect math for like how those people convert. I just have a feeling that, and I believe in owning, owning our audience and building out that own channel, that if we have an email list of 30, 40, 50,000 people, that's going to be a good thing. So, okay, boom, there's another KPI. Right.

And what I would do if I were in your shoes and you're obviously, you know, I would argue way more accomplished than I am in my career with marketing. I think you're 100% right. If that email subscription number is the North Star, then I would put all your measurement towards that and say, how do we drive x thousand email subscriptions? And I'm fairly sure, and you would be too, that going from 14,000 to 50,000 is automatically going to improve your subscription count number. And that's just the nature of the business. Now where people get hung up is when they believe that moving some other KPI is not going to move your actual revenue number. Right. So if you were to tell me somebody might come into your business and say, well, you know, Dave, great, you have 50,000 subscribers, but you're, you know, sorry, 50,000 email subscribers, but you still have only 3,000. Well then your premise was wrong. Then your hypothesis was wrong about it doesn't matter how many people you have in your email audience because they're still not subscribing to the community. So that's something that you just have to iterate. Like that's the core part of your business model. That's not a marketing measurement question.

Right. And I think that I do still think that you can, you can measure everything. But I think like the, the part business, you have to make bets. Right. And it's not going to be like a paint by numbers approach. And so like one bet.

Exactly.

I want to make sure. Okay, so let's go back. So we're going back to this methodology. Measurement number one is step one is what's the thing that you're measuring?

Yep. Step two is now looking at all of the different marketing channels that you have paid, owned, and earned. So this is not just about advertising. This is about everything that you do in your marketing mix. And what you really want to measure on a daily or a weekly basis is the number of people that you are reaching through each of those channels. Very simple. How many eyeballs, how many people are you reaching through every single channel on a daily or weekly basis? You can literally do this in a spreadsheet. You don't need software, Right. Organic, social. How many people are in your LinkedIn audience? Email. How many people are opening up your email? If you're doing any advertising, if you're doing community, then how many people are actively engaged in the community on a weekly basis? Now, when you track this on a daily or a weekly basis over a period of six to nine months, you can now see which channels have the maximum reach. And this concept of reaching, you know, this has been around forever. This is not a new thing. That's how advertisers and marketers have thought about. I need maximum reach with the right audience. So I'm not saying, you know, reach people that are not part of your audience, but maximize your reach within that audience.

Okay, wait, do you have a way of. Do you have a way of. Is there a way to filter that? Right. Because all reach is not created equal. I could write some Viral, you know, LinkedIn post about my kids or something, but the audience for that is not going to overlap for the. There's only a universe of a hundred accounts that might be eligible that might be a good fit to buy my software. So how do you. How do you think about that?

Again, that's a question of just, you know, good versus bad marketing. Yeah. Like, of course, if you're gonna do irrelevant stuff that doesn't apply to your brand, then, you know, what are you doing? You shouldn't be a marketer. But that just goes without saying. Like, I. I don't think that you need to measure the quality of the reach. Like, please do. Don't do stupid things. Use common sense and, you know, market to the people that are actually part of your audience. And I don't think you need to measure that. That's my take.

Got it. So. So you would basically, you could throw those, you could throw those out because it's like that you reached a lot of people, but that's not who matters for us.

Yes. You really want to care about, you know, who. Who's in your audience. And are you reaching more and more people within your audience every day? Every Week. And that's a number that you should be tracking. And you should be doing this across all of your channels. That's the most important thing. Because most people don't do this, right? Most people only look at clicks and form fills on these direct response channels. Okay, step number three is where things get interesting. Now that you have your output metric, which is your subscriber, your email subscriber list, or your community paid subscriber list, and now you have all the input metrics, which are your reach metrics across every single channel, and you can even do that at a campaign level. You can now start to see the correlation between the two. Now, this is a very simple way of explaining it. When your reach on LinkedIn goes up and to the right, do you see a corresponding increase in your email subscriber count? When your reach on PR channels go up, do you see a corresponding increase in your email subscription count? And the vice versa, Right? When your reach goes down, like for whatever reason you didn't do a bunch of organic social, do you see an actual decrease? And this is where the technology comes in. It can actually detect the statistical correlation between all of your channels and your campaigns and your output metric. And it puts all types of campaigns on equal footing. So this whole conversation of brand and performance and direct response and offers and all of that stuff, you don't have to think about. You can compare all parts of your marketing mix and get a good statistically sound answer on what is contributing the most to your subscriber count. So that's the third part. Now, you know, we can talk a little bit more about it, but very simple. It's just math.

What do you. Someone's going to listen to this and be like, no, this is too simple. This isn't going to work for me. What would you say to that?

Well, you got to try it, right? If it's too. I love simplicity. I don't know about other folks, but there's so much, you know, people talk about first touch, last touch, W U, linear time, decay, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, you don't need 90% of that. You just don't.

All right, so how would, how would you, Sorry. The first one is, what's the thing you're measuring? Second one is, look at all the marketing channels you have paid, earned, earned and owned. What, what, what would you headline this one or how would you title this one?

The third, the third correlation, find the correlations between all your marketing channels and that output metric. And you can do this in a spreadsheet if you're good with Excel, or you can find a software vendor, or you can hire a data scientist or a business analyst to do this for you. There's a variety of different options. We're not the only ones. We're one of them. But there's a multitude of ways of solving this problem.

Well, this. I mean, this kind of is the game in the simplest form, which is like, let's measure all. Let's measure all these things and see what we should do more of.

Precisely. Exactly.

And then go do more of it. I think the other thing that has always frustrated me about measurement and attribution is it's just date. It's just going to be another data point. It's not going to say, here's where you're. Here's. If you magically do this, here's where your next 50 customers are going to come from. It's going to give you ideas of what might be worth spending your time. But none of this is going to lead to this. Like, boop. Here's this. Paint by number, okay? Post on LinkedIn 5 times, send 2 emails, do this thing. And then here you go. Like, the business doesn't. Customers don't get.

You're 100% right. And this is where, you know, I would argue, step number four comes in. The step number four is, okay, you've now got a sense of what you're optimizing for all your inputs. You've done your correlation. You understand which parts are contributing to that output metric. Step number four is starting to get into forecasting. This is the holy grail of what a CFO and a CEO want is.

You're telling me. In the early days of drift when I worked there, we brought on our first ops guy, Will Collins, if you're listening, I love you. And the first year, we grew really fast, and we just did a lot of stuff. Organic Twitter, LinkedIn, podcasting, whatever. He's like, I need you to help me build a forecast for next year. I'm like, forecast? I'm like, you can't forecast this. This is all creative. This is all just, like, stuff. And he's like, no, no, you can forecast it. He's like, how many. How many blog posts are we going to write? How many social media? I'm like, oh, man, I don't know. And he's like, well, we got to get smart at this. And this was my first. You know, the maturation of Dave G. As a. As a marketer was like, all right, yeah, I guess I understand. Like, why all of the organic, you know, random stuff is great. It doesn't work great if you're trying to grow a business. Right. And so I couldn't just be like, I'm the crate. We're just doing random stuff on social media. It's like, no. Businesses thrive on predictability and repeatability. And so, like, what I like about how you've approached this, even from the couple minutes we've been talking, is like, you need to have a philosophy. And so I should have grown up a little bit and been a little bit wiser on, like, it's not direct response, but roughly, we need to publish this much. Right? And I, I even know that now, like with LinkedIn, I know, roughly we need to be publishing, you know, three to five times a week. Okay, great. Boom, there we go. We can start to build a little bit of a forecast.

Right? And you're 100, right? Right. Like, when you think about how businesses grow, it's that predictability and repeatability. And I don't mean that that's. You're not going to get that in your, you know, first couple of million dollars of revenue. Like, that shouldn't be the goal. Like, there, you're just, like, making big bets because you don't know what's going to work, what's not going to work when you're 10, 20, 50, $100 million in revenue. Predictability is extremely important because you're on that path to going public or having an exit. And if you can't forecast well, you have a problem, you have a massive problem. And marketers are equally on the hook for the forecast of the company. And so forecasting, when you have a set of correlations from your historical performance, you can actually now say that, okay, this is what my trajectory looks like for the future. It's very repeatable, and it's all based on math. And finance professionals are going to love you because that's to your point, right? That's what they thrive on. They need that for their P. L. And then the last piece after forecasting is experimentation. Now, experimentation is how you unlock new levels of growth. You kind of already mentioned you got to place bets, and some of those bets are going to come from the outputs of that correlation. I'll give you an example. For one of our customers. We see that, okay, this one specific campaign within Facebook has the potential, it's a massive contributor, and it has the potential to do really well. You can actually design an experiment to see what happens if you double the spend and do it in A statistically sound manner to see if that actually works. And guess what? 70% of your experiments are going to fail. That's just the nature of experimentation. That's just the nature of anything creative. And that's the last part of the puzzle of finding new campaigns or channels or strategies to help you unlock more growth. And I'll say one last thing before I hand it back over to you. None of this is going to work if you don't have great ideas. So going back to your original point, right, Measurement is not going to solve your growth problems. Great ideas and a great value prop and a great offer is what's going to solve your growth problems. And so I say that to every customer. Don't come to us and say we're going to solve and somehow magically identify a 10x growth idea. That's not how measurement works.

Well, I think, I think you're right. And I also think that, and I'm saying this because I'm strongly on the other side, which is like, if you could have two marketers, you could have the Dave marketer who's like, lots of ideas. Momentum, speed, we're shipping things, we're doing things, we're getting attention, we're growing awareness, right? That's going to bring in new customers faster than the other bucket, which is like, hold on, hold on. Before we do anything, we need to make sure we can measure this. However, I do think that the best place is to meet is to marry the two things together and meet in the middle. And like, even now I've said if I were to ever go be like a CMO somewhere else or go do a new startup or whatever, or I guess now even with Exit 5, like, I know that because coming up with the ideas is not going to be the issue. Like, if Exit 5 doesn't grow, it's not going to be for lack of ideas and things we could do. Whereas, like, I need to skew. That's just because of my bias. I need to skew more towards the. Like, let's be able to measure this. Let's be able to, to, to scale this. So I think, I think you need them, you need them both. But it is refreshing to hear you say that great ideas are going to solve the growth problems, not the fact that you can measure it, because you can, you could be great at measurement, but if the, if the reading on that is going to tell you zero, then you're not in a great spot.

Agreed, 100%. And I would have the same bias as you, right? So as we're building out Powermark, like we don't need measurement right now. We're a three person startup, you know, we have great pipeline, we have great customers, we're doing a bunch of sales and outbound. I'm not going to invest in marketing measurement for my three person startup. I'm probably not going to invest in measurement ourselves probably until I get to 5 or 10 million in ARR because I don't need it. We know what is working just viscerally being part of the day to day and that's what I would actually recommend to all startups. You don't need fancy software, what you need is great ideas and invest in that until you get to a scale where now you have a complicated mix, right? You're doing pr, you're doing events, you're doing advertising, you're doing billboards. That's when it gets a little bit harder to know, okay, should I pour another 500k in a billboard or should I not? Right? What's the return on that?

And it's just, it's so different depending on the stage of a company too, right? Like a HubSpot or a salesforce is going to be able to spend more and do things, you know, you know, run studies about recall to like figure that type of stuff out where the early stage. I mean you all are not going to go spend and try to and try to do that stuff. What's your, what's your perspective on something like self reported attribution where in addition to all the measurement, you know, you can let people write in, hey, how did you hear about us?

I'm, I'm a big believer in getting that data point. I think of that as qualitative research and I think it's incredibly useful and valuable. The problem is that it is not free of bias. So there's a very simple thing called recency bias. It's a cognitive bias of like you only remember the things that are most recent. So you know, am I really going to remember how I found, you know, I use this Opal camera. So free shout out to Opal. Am I going to remember how I bought that camera? Like where am I hear about it first? Probably have no clue. I probably saw it like 10 times. I probably saw it on multiple channels and especially in this day and age, a LinkedIn video versus a YouTube short versus a TikTok versus an Instagram reel all look the same. I have no way of remembering where I saw that thing for the first time. So I think use it but please don't think of it as ground truth. That's going to get you in trouble because that's just not how human brains work.

I like to use it just directionally. Like. Wow. A lot of people tell us that they heard about Exit 5 through LinkedIn. Okay. So therefore it's important for me to. It's given me like for a while I felt like I was just kind of playing the LinkedIn game, just to play the game. And this was more when I was in between things. And now that I'm focused on Exit 5, it's like, oh no, no. When you post there, it's, it brings in new members. Like let's, let's just keep doing that. I don't need to over measure it. We just know that it works.

Right? Yeah. And I think in general for the field that we are in. Right. When you think about B2B marketing, B2B SaaS, B2B sales, LinkedIn is great. I think they're doing really cool stuff. They're helping both organic and paid. I think they're innovating at a fast pace. So I'm a big believer in just. You shouldn't have to need measurement to know that LinkedIn is the place to be. Especially if you're in B2B SaaS or sales and marketing. Gotta invest in LinkedIn.

What. So how are you thinking about as the, as the marketer or CEO or head of growth of your company now Paramark. What. How are you, how are you getting customers? We. I haven't talked to somebody that's at early stage in a while and it is one of the questions that comes up often inside of the community like let's talk about going from zero to one.

Yeah, it's. It's a great question. So I'm fortunate and privileged. I spent 13 years working at, you know, really good companies or before I had to ever even think about starting Paramark. And so I had a network and that's where I started. Is literally looked at everybody that I know that is a VP of marketing or a CMO or a finance person or a sales leader, they all care about this problem and just reached out to them and said hey, we're working on something new. Would love your take on what we're building. And that led to the first million in pipeline. Pretty straightforward. We leveraged our entire investor base and we raised the friends and family type of round and that was the same equation. Every investor who believed in us was excited to kind of make some intros. So it was all sort of what I call warm Outbound. And that was it that got us going. We started to do a little bit of marketing, right? We got our website open like three months ago or something and started to post on LinkedIn more actively when we knew, you know, what we wanted to put out there and what we wanted the narrative to be. And that has resulted in a little bit, and that's been pretty much it. We're going to start doing a bunch of content marketing at this point. But that's like after a million in pipeline.

Tell me about LinkedIn specifically, how are you spending your time there? And how does a busy, important CEO find the time to be posting on LinkedIn?

Oh my God.

Sorry. I'm so bitter about that. I'm so sorry.

Well, so here's, here's what I think. I think if, if, if CEOs can't find time for marketing, you know, that's, that's a problem. And LinkedIn is not the only answer. I don't, I don't think that as a CEO you have to invest in LinkedIn only, but you gotta find time for marketing just like you find time for product, just like you find time for sales, just like you find time for HR and finance and all that other stuff. So you gotta invest in marketing and how you do it, whether that's by putting your own narrative and story out there, whether it's by supporting the narrative that your CMO or VP of marketing is coming up with, or whether there's something else, right? You gotta figure out the tactics. And LinkedIn is one of them. That's not the only one. But you have to invest in marketing. Now there's a flip side to it. I would also say that I used to be of the opinion that, oh, CEOs who don't get marketing don't ever work for them. And somebody really smart, somebody way smarter than me, re educated me on that topic recently and said that, hey, if you're a VP of marketing or cmo, it's your job to educate your CEO on how to do marketing, right? And yes, of course, they have to be willing to learn and adopt those lessons, but it's your job as much as the CEO's job. And so I've changed my opinion on that. And I think all director and above marketing leaders need to be those internal marketers. And that's what you got hired for, right? That's why you have a job.

I think this comes up a lot in the community and we've talked about it a couple times on the podcast, but I think one thing that stood out to me in making the jump from director of marketing to VP or CMO is as much as we talked about earlier, great ideas win. Unfortunately, inside of the company, if you're the marketing leader, you actually got to spend. It can't just be all the great ideas. And I fell down a bunch of times in my career because of that. Where you need to. No, you need to know what the CEO cares about, what the CFO cares about. You need to know how to influence change in the product Org. You need to be able to work with the head of product. You need to be able to work with the head of sales and sales enablement. And there's just so many people that marketing. I love the job. I think marketing is super fun, but it can be. It's frustrating at times because, like, you're often asked to, like, present the dish to the world, but, like, you didn't go shopping for the groceries, you didn't come up with the recipe, you didn't even cook it right. But you have to, like. And so that's where a lot of that breaks down. And I think the times that I've been the most successful inside of a company, it's been when I've been the closest with the other key executives. And they were like, marketing is our superpower. Like, we want Dave and the marketing team involved in this project. I've been on the other side of it where they're like, no, don't involve them. They're going to blow this up. They're going to change everything. And that's toxic. It's gotta be like, sales wants you in the room. Product wants you in the room. I had an amazing relationship with this guy Craig, who was the VP of product when I worked at Drift. And he would be like, he would text me. He'd come out of meeting, he'd be like, text me. He's like, I need to meet you right now. I gotta show you something that we just talked about. And at other companies I've been in, it's like, wait, we're not even. We're not ready to tell marketing what we talked about in the engineering meeting yet. Where he was like, no, come in now. We gotta. We gotta show you this. And that's. That's where you want to be. I think.

I think you're 100% right. And this is where you know that internal storytelling, both sort of marrying the creative and the analytics together is the secret superpower that you got to have and that you don't have to have that as a VP of marketing or cmo. You can have that as a right hand person to the CMO who understand the analytics pieces and brings that to the table on a weekly basis. And so, you know, that's what it takes to scale again. You don't need that in the early parts of a business, but you need that at a scaling business.

All right. Anything else on your mind before I. Before I let you out of the hot seat? I want to make sure you have a chance to. If there's something that, you know, you wish I asked you, this is a good time for us to have a discussion about it.

Oh, I appreciate that. No, I think, you know, I. I love what you all are doing with Exit five. Big believer. I. I remember. This is a fun story. I started following you, I think three or four years ago when I saw your 10 laws of copywriting course. So that's where we go back and I think everybody should take that course. I don't know if you're reviving.

Here's what's part of. Thank you for teeing that up because I've taken everything that I've done for the last three years and we put it inside the Exit 5 community. And so if someone has access to Exit 5, you can go into Exit 5 community. Scroll down the left side, go to Resources and under. Under videos. I think it's under videos. Hold on. Let me. Please hold. Me and my staff here are just confirming this. Okay. Yeah. On Resources, if you go into templates, I have my laws of copywriting in there. And so a lot of people don't. Don't know that, but we put that in there. There's a bunch of other copywriting stuff too. Okay, that's cool. I appreciate. So you're back. That was the first online thing that I did like that. I launched it on my 33rd birthday and I said, today only is 33 bucks for my 33rd birthday. And it went.

Yeah, I remember something like that. Yeah, yeah. So great job. And think about that. Right? Like people. So one last thing. People remember great marketing like that. And it's been four years, but I know exactly where I heard about Dave the first time. It was that course.

What's funny is for something like that, I had the idea for the launch and the domain, everything before I even created the content. And I think I learned so much from Drift working for David Cancel about this, which is like back to the good ideas part. I feel like the execution part is like creating the content of that course was the easy part, that, that's. I had just spent however many years doing this, like, I got that all. But it's like, oh, what should I call this? I'm gonna call this the laws of copywriting. Grabbing the domain, creating the landing page. Like, how am I gonna do a launch? Oh, what day? I'm gonna launch it on my birthday. Because I know that on social media, on your birthday, everybody, if I say, oh, today's my birthday, everyone's gonna comment. And so if everybody comments on that day, it's my birthday, that post is gonna get a ton of reading. That's the stuff that gets me fired up is like thinking of that and then the execution of like, how we're going to go and create it. Where I know for, for many people it's like you go spend six weeks recording all these videos and you're like, oh man, I just spent six weeks on this. I think before I even like recorded the first video, I had like a waiting list up and so people could get on the list for email. Stuff like that I think is so important from a marketing standpoint.

Agreed 100%. And then, you know, last plug, everyone check out Power Market and give us feedback. If you like what we're doing, you know, let us know. If you don't like what we're doing.

Let us know who's the ideal customer for like where the product is at today.

Yeah, so we're actively working with some of the largest brands in both B2B and B2C. People who are spending between 10 to $100 million in marketing across paid, earned and owned. We work with CMOs, VPs of marketing, CFOs and yeah, so, you know, one of the things that I say always is we're always on the side of the marketer. We're here to help you tell your story at the board, at the executive leadership, to your entire company and how you are driving growth for the business.

That's smart. That's. To me, that's the best B2B market. That's the best B2B marketing strategy is like, how can you help your customer get smarter about the thing? And so like, if you, if Paramark is not just like an analytics company for marketers, but it's like, oh, this company taught me how to like present to the board and they happen to have the software that I can use to do that. That's. I love that approach. I also, I like this manifesto on your, on your website. This has a sale, like sales letter, vibes. You have your you have your little signature. You have you and you and Pete there. The signature. I like that. It's. It's nice. Nice touch. Have you raised money?

We have. We raised a couple of million dollars just as we got started. It was the worst timing. We did this in Q1 of 2023. So as just as SVB is going down and we were expecting wires that week and I'm like, oh, this is not going to happen, is it? But then, you know, it did happen. Well, I mean, you know, it wasn't in the now. In hindsight, it wasn't such a big deal. Right. So things panned out, everything worked out and people had access to their funds and they were able to wire it. Just, it was a nerve wracking situation back in Q1. So, yeah, it's been a fun 12 months.

Well, now hopefully the rockiness is over and I don't want to lead the witness, but are you bullish about B2B SaaS? What side of this do you fall on? Obviously you're gonna say yes because you're the CEO of a company and you're trying to grow this thing. Give me some positive. I want to have some positive. Yeah. All right, so fine, be real. You can be real. That's okay. I'll accept it.

I'm a realist. I think about if you look at the public markets and you look at the most successful B2B SaaS companies, what do you see? You see everyone is moving towards profitability and everyone is moving towards shoring up their product, their core product, and doing a good job with that. And I think Those are the two things that are going to matter in 2024. If you're not thinking about profitability right now, every day, every week, you have a problem. And if you're not thinking about building great product, you have a problem. And so that's what I would say. Our focus is getting to profitability and breakeven and building a great product that serves CMOs and helps them drive impact. So I'm bullish about our ability to do that. I think there's a lot of folks in B2B SaaS who are not thinking enough about it and that's going to be challenging for them.

Love that, the push to profitability. I also feel like it makes marketing much easier when, you know what, when you have clear metrics. Right.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. Cool. All right, Pranav, it was nice to finally get you on camera and say, hi, I wish you a bunch of luck this year. I'm sure we'll we'll see more of each other. Maybe, maybe we'll have you back on at some point. And I'd love to do like what people really want from Exit We. I want to do like how to present about these meds, like how to present to the board. You just mentioned that idea that that topic comes up all the time. How to present to leadership, how to talk about measurement to your CEO and the board. Like we should think about we could do something that in the future that'd be really valuable.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Big fan. And yeah, would love to come on and talk about exactly that. Love it.

All right, cool. Thank you. And hey, look, if you, if you like Pranav's point of view on things and, and his notes, don't just go check out Powermark, go find him on LinkedIn, send him a note, be like, hey, I heard you on Exit 5. That that type of stuff brings me a little bit of joy. All right. Thank you for listening to this episode. We will see you on the next one. We're out of here. Exit.

Exit. Sam.