Customer-Centric Marketing with Ryan Deiss | S01 E13

Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Breed's Adding Value podcast. My name is Guido and I'm the manager of acquisition and strategy at New Breed. For those of you who don't know, New Breed is a customer acquisition agency focused on helping B2B companies grow and expand their business. And we do this by following the inbound methodology, which at its core is about adding value before extracting value. So the goal of this podcast is to bring you stories of how people add value to their customers, their company, and the individuals around them. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, give us a five star rating and check out the rest of our content on newbreedmarketing.com today. I'm excited to have Ryan Deiss join the podcast. You are the founder and CEO of Digital Marketer, one of the leading providers of digital marketing training and certifications. You're the founder of the Traffic and Conversion Summit. You're also a prominent speaker at events like Drift's Hyper Growth Conference. And I could go on and on and on. But either way, I am truly honored to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for joining.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. So you founded Digital marketer back in 2009, but you've been in the field of digital marketing since you were in college at the University of Texas. Do you mind sharing a little about your background, how you got started in digital marketing as a college student in the middle of the dot com boom?

Yeah, and I'm old, so I'll kind of be brief as I can. But yeah, I made my very first sale online in 1999. So I was a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin. The dot com boom was in full swing and I wanted to be a part of it. So I tried to get a job at. You know, back then they didn't call them startups, they called them dot com. Right. So what would now be, you know, startup. Want to get a job at a startup, be involved in that? Nobody was hiring a 19 year old kid who didn't have any actual skills. So I figured I should learn how to do web design and so I kind of taught myself web design. Still couldn't get a job, but I kind of started offering my web design services to people. One of the only clients that I could get at the time was a lactation consultant, which if you know what a lactation consultant is, if you have kids, you probably do, but lactation consultant basically helps new moms nurse their kids. I got four of them. So we have benefited. Mightily from the services of lactation consultants my wife has in particular. But at the time, at 19, it was a little bit awkward, to say the least to be building a website for a lactation consultant. It was even more awkward when the site was done and it came time for her to pay me and she couldn't pay me. Her husband had just lost his job, they didn't have any income, she had to go back to work. And I felt really bad for her. But what she said is, she said, look, I wrote this ebook on how to make your own baby food that I also planned on kind of offering and you know, I'll give you this ebook that you can just go ahead and sell this little, you know, PDF. I remember thinking, the heck am I supposed to do with this? But, but I took that little ebook, built a simple one page website. Back then, ranking in the search engines was a lot easier than it is today. Google Adwords didn't yet exist. Now, Google Ads didn't yet exist, but there was this new platform called Goto.com, which later became Overture and then Yahoo Search Network bought some ads on that and made my very first sale. And that's kind of when I was hooked into the kind of digital marketing world back then. It was just such a small world, so few people doing it. That kind of, by virtue of doing it, I also got asked to talk about it and to teach. So that's, I was always kind of living in these two worlds of, of doing it and talking about it, doing it and talking about it. And so like you said in 2009, kind of said we should create a company that actually talks about it. I've been doing it for, you know, almost 20 years or whatever. We should actually create a, create a company that earned 10 years at that point to create a company that does that. So that's when Digital Marketer was born.

That's awesome. And one of the things you touched on there that I want to start to ask about is you mentioned that it's, it was easier to rank on Google then. Google Ads didn't exist then. Digital marketing as a whole was drastically different back in 2009 than it is today. Apart from those things, what are some of the other big differences that you notice today compared to back then?

Back then, not everybody even believed that they needed a website. There was almost no competition. I remember when I got the baby food product selling, I said, gosh, I should do a ton of these. And so I had a hundred little websites selling a ton of little products. And all these little niche markets had no competition and Amazon was around, but they were really only selling physical books. Kindle didn't exist yet. It was just, it was easy in so many ways and really hard in a lot of ways. Right? So getting started, getting a merchant account was brutally difficult back then, right? You had to go down to your local bank and all, all the stuff in the back had to be coded and it was complicated and there wasn't as much trust. I remember having people call up and say, I don't feel good about getting my credit card over the Internet. Can I give it to you over the phone? As if that's any safer. It's way less safe. Right? But definitely from a competition standpoint, things were easy and now it's completely flipped. Today, every market saturated that's worth being in. But at the same time, today it's easier than ever to get started. You know, building a website, easy. Getting set up with payment is easy. So the starting process is easier. The scaling process has really gotten a lot harder. And as a result of that, there's really no more inefficiencies anymore. You know, it used to be the name of the game when I probably, for the first decade and a half of my marketing career, the person, the company who won was the company who figured out kind of the crack in the matrix. The person who figured out where the little hack could be done, where there was the little tweak that you could make on your site that would instantly rank you on the first page in Google. That's what the whole thing was about. And that's where you had a lot of companies were born out of that era. You think about Airbnb, right? They basically got started by kind of hacking and spamming Craigslist. Lots of companies got started by just harvesting email addresses and spamming them. All this stuff that we would understandably and appropriately look down on and completely say, no, that's bad. And in many cases it's full blown illegal. Back then it was the wild, wild west. We were figuring this stuff out as we were going along. And today all those loopholes have been closed. Today there aren't the inefficiencies that there once were. Today you have to actually build a real brand, you have to actually build a real company.

It's interesting. It's one of the things that makes digital marketing today both easy, like you said, and harder at the same time. It's easy because people have kind of paved that path. They've shown you what works. They've shown you the best practices so you can learn that stuff a lot faster now. You don't have to figure it out on your own. But. But it's also been paved because there's so many people who have done it now that you're now competing against, which makes it that much harder to rank and to do all those new things. So you continue to have to find some of those newer strategies, those cutting edge things to break through the clutter.

Which all the stuff that used to be the ultimate growth hack is now just table stakes.

Exactly.

Yeah. You just have to know how to do it.

Yeah. Growth hacking right now is just marketing. That's it. We've written about that ourselves too. There's, there's very little truth to growth hacking being like a proven marketing concept. It's just what you need to be doing day to day. So I want to ask about some of those things that are table stakes and some of the things that are newer that people need to be doing. And one of the biggest areas within that scope is content marketing. Content marketing used to be you're going to create a blog and you're going to write posts on it twice per week for as long as you want to to bring traffic to your website. And a lot of companies are still doing that, obviously. But why is that not what companies should be doing, what they should be focusing their time on anymore? What else should they be considering?

Well, I think you still have to do that. It's just now step one, it used to be that was the only step. It used to be create content, traffic arrives. Now it's create content, pay to amplify that content. And then if you can kind of break through the, you know, through the clutter, if you can, you know, pixel and get, you know, drive enough subscribers to kind of build your own media, then maybe over time that content will turn into a predictable flow of traffic and leads and sales. But the idea that I'm just going to produce content, put it out there and people will see it is just not how the game works anymore. It can work if you already have a large platform. Right. So obviously you mentioned Inbound. I know you'll do a lot of work with HubSpot and their platform. We do a lot of work with them too. You know, HubSpot built their database, they built their, their email following, they built a lot of their search rankings at a time when it was much easier to do. We did the same thing at Digital Marketer, did the same thing in a lot of my companies. Today when we go and start a new company. We will still create a blog for it. We will still produce pillar content, you know, these like skyscraper content pieces. We will still produce pieces of content, satellite pieces of content that are designed to kind of hit on more narrow subjects and maybe be a little bit more snackable that funnel back into our pillar content. We'll still do all of the stuff that is just your content marketing table stakes. The difference is we have to, we have to apply an ad budget to the amplification of this content. It used to be you did content and that was your organic strategy and then you bought advertising over here, maybe. I remember everybody, including my friends at HubSpot, they would brag about the fact that, oh, we don't spend any money on advertising. It's all inbound. Well, I always thought that that was a false dichotomy. I was like, why not do both? But roi. But it used to be that it was two separate practices. You had content marketing and search and organic over here on this side. And then the other side was, you know, was more that kind of that, that demand generation, that paid advertising. Today, if you do paid advertising direct to a landing page, you have no relationship. Your conversion rate's going to be terrible. It's probably not going to roi. The different ad channels, if they're social, they're probably, you know, I'm not saying that they're going to like ban your account, but you're going to get a low quality score for that ad that they're gonna charge you so much. It's not gonna work. So today I've really seen organic and paid come together. And so now it's both produce amazing content. It's the incredibly active on the different social channels. Give them exactly what they want and oh yeah, pay so that people actually see it. And it's that second part that a lot of people aren't willing to do because they're like, oh, but they're my audience. I shouldn't have to pay to reach my audience. They're not your audience. They're Google's audience. It's Facebook's audience, it's Instagram's audience, it's YouTube's audience. You know, that's the name of the game. And it's nothing new, by the way. This has happened. This is how business works. The stores, you think about retail, you think about a Walmart or one of these other ones, they will stock a product, but that product still needs to advertise itself. Even though they're saying, go to these places to Buy it. There is an expectation that the product advertise itself and send folks into the store to get it. Today, those stores just look very different than they did in the past.

The way that I like to explain marketing to some of the new people that join New Breed is there's really two core pieces of it in a major sense. There's the content creation side of things where you're creating written pieces of content, videos, podcasts, stuff like that. But then you need to get it out in front of people. You need to promote that content. You need to make sure that people can see it. I really like that you mentioned that organic search and paid search are becoming merged under one discipline now. Each should inform the other. If we're ranking for this in organic, how can we supplement that and amplify that with paid and vice versa? How can we learn from what we've seen in paid search to be able to build out our organic content strategy even further? There's all of those things. All of those disciplines are just kind of falling under one umbrella now. And you need to be a master of all those skill sets or at least need to have a team of people who master those skill sets in order to be successful at this point. One of the things that I've started to talk about too, with my team and with our clients is the fact that it's starting to feel like in order to break through some of the clutter that's out there now, that content needs to be remarkable. It needs to be something that people are going to resonate with. But in a sense, especially given people's attention spans at this point, there needs to be almost an entertaining element to it as well. That's some of the reasons why videos are doing well. You can add that layer to it. How much do you think that's true? How entertaining do you feel like content needs to be in order to break through clutter?

Yeah, I mean, content is of two forms, either information or entertainment. Right. You're either going to inform, you're going to entertain. And all you have to do is look at the pay scale differences between teachers and professors versus entertainers to understand what our culture and society values more. I believe that entertainment is the currency that we have to spend if we want to attract the attention of, frankly, a too distracted world. And I learned that one of my marketing mentors, Ro Williams, taught me that, you know, we are dealing with a distracted world. People's attention spans haven't changed. I don't believe we just have more options than ever. We have the opportunity to have, you know, our attention spans interrupted and shortened more than we used to. And so, yeah, information alone, if somebody's searching for what you're looking for, so somebody's really, really, you know, they're, they're hurting, they got a mega problem and they're searching for it, then yes, by all means, information, informative stuff. How to step by step, Q and A, that's going to perform really, really, really well. But that's only going to get you the problem aware people.

Right.

Those folks who are aware that they have a problem that at any given time is going to be a relatively small percentage of your addressable market. Right. Depending on how mature your market is, it could be 5%, could be 10%, could be 40%, but it's not going to be 80, 90%.

Right.

The vast majority of your market is not keenly aware that they have a problem. They're not actively searching for a solution. And the way that you're going to engage with them, yes, you're going to need to entertain them. So we think about ad campaigns like the Dollar Shave Club ad, which was a funny ad. It was a funny ad. You think about the Harmon Brothers and they had the chat books ad and the poo pourri ad.

Right.

These are all things that we're selling, products that are either commoditized or that we didn't even know we needed. Right. And so what do they have to do? They had to entertain us, they had to capture our attention and get us to hang around long enough so that they could sell to us. But again, I would argue this is nothing new. If you want to run an ad during the super bowl, that's a lot of people who are not there to, I mean, they're now there to watch the commercials. Why? Because the commercials are funny, they're entertaining. Right. So this is, this is the evolution of advertising and it always has been. Pick up a magazine that's been around for more than 20 years, you're not seeing a bunch of like hard hitting, long form, direct response stuff. It's not that it doesn't work, it's that that's not gonna fly there. People are, they're, they're flipping through, they want to be entertained. So I think today more than ever, there needs to be some type of entertainment component built in, especially to your top, top, top of funnel stuff especially do begin to progress down through the funnel. You can shift to education. But if you really want to widen the top of the funnel, you got.

Entertained and there's Some companies have been really successful that and those that have seem to be adopting some of those principles that you mentioned that have been used in other industries or in other ways, whether that's the Super Bowl, TV ad, the magazine ad, the billboard. A lot of companies in digital marketing seem to be adopting those types of principles and finding ways to apply it to what they're doing today to expand the top of the funnel. I wouldn't necessarily put drift 100% in this category, but they're doing a great job of building their brand by helping people connect with that, by being a little bit more personal and entertaining, which is really cool to see companies be able to adopt that strategy in this space in this day and age. So I want to shift gears a little bit here. One of the other things that I didn't mention in your intro was that you helped develop the methodology around customer value optimization. Can you explain what that is and where that methodology came from?

Sure. And I mean, you know, as we record this, it's particularly apropos. I first heard and kind of learned about this concept from another one of my marketing mentors, a true legend who sadly passed very, very recently by the name of Dan Kennedy. And Dan Kennedy was pretty famous for saying, you know, he who is willing to spend the most to acquire a customer wins. So I've changed it. You know, obviously want to be more inclusive. He or she who's able and willing to spend the most to acquire a customer wins. That is the foundational concept and understanding of customer value optimization, right? It is. It is sad, but it is a reality. The best product or service does not win. It just. That's not how it works. It's the best marketed product or service. There are inferior products with more VC funding who are able to go and spend more to acquire customers, to acquire customers that drown out, you know, more superior products. That is again, just the reality. And it's particularly the reality today when there's no more blue ocean, right? When every single category has somebody in it. And, you know, everybody's wanting to do their own category creation because they're trying to carve out, you know, their, their little local maximum. But, you know, the reality is it's just still very, very, you know, it's still crowded. So more than ever, the way that we win this is, yes, again, you have to have an amazing product. That's table stakes. But you have to structure the economics of your business such that you can afford to spend more than your competitor to acquire a customer. Now, there's two ways to do that. The first way that you do that is you just raise a bunch of capital, get an enormous amount of cash in the bank, and you spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, and hope that it works out. That is a high stakes game. It's a game that many companies play and that very few but some notable ones win. They eventually figure out their economics and they make it work before they run out of cash. And so that's one way to do it. Now, that's not an option for a lot of folks, and even if it is, it doesn't. A lot of people don't want to take that path. So the other option, if you don't want to just spend, spend, spend to, you know, to acquire, is the structure, the economics of your entire customer journey, such that you're able to spend more. And the way that we do that is, you know, it starts by just simply outlining what is the customer journey, right? What does each stage look like? How do they become aware? How do they begin to engage? And customer journeys are nothing new, funnels are nothing new. But very few businesses take the time to actually map out the entirety of their journey, from awareness to engagement, to the point where they subscribe to the point where they kind of make that first micro commitment and ultimately get excited and make the larger purchase and stick around and begin to ascend. And then they turn into an advocate and a promoter. Very few companies map that out. But a beautiful thing happens when you do map it out. You're able to look at each stage and you're able to optimize each one of these stages in the journey independently. And so if you take one stage and you can improve it by 10%, and another one, you can improve it by 15%, another one, you know, maybe only get 2% out of it, but another one, you get 18% out of it, maybe one of them, you're able to double the conversion rate on your lead capture page. That's not that absurd. People do that all the time. But in the aggregate, you make it to where any one of these customers who begins to go through this journey with you, they are now worth double, triple what they would have been worth before. And what that allows you to do is to spend more to acquire a customer. And so that's what I spend the bulk of my time doing. I spend the bulk of my time, whether it's my companies or the companies that I advise, mapping out their journey, getting crystal clear on how is the value created, both from the customer and to the customer. You got to also Map through that. Now, where are we delivering value such that they want to continue on this journey with us? But once you have it mapped out, now it's time to get tactical. Now it's time to say, okay, tactically speaking, things are looking pretty good. And then we're losing a lot of folks right here at this stage. Maybe you're getting a lot of demos, but they're not rolling over into sales. So what can we do to optimize this? And that allows you to focus your tactics and then you just move around to different stages of the journey. I believe a book that every marketer should read is the Goal by Eli Goldratt. Have you heard of the Goal?

I actually haven't. I'm taking notes actually right now to write that down and put it on my reading list.

Yeah, so the Goal is not a marketing book. The Goal is a manufacturing book. It was written decades and decades ago, before the Internet was even a thing. Right. And the Goal is really was kind of the book that ushered in the concept of like lean manufacturing and theory of constraints, right. But what the Goal seeks to do is it talks about how in any manufacturing line, right? So let's say we're making widgets, right? And there's going to be different stages of this manufacturing line. What the basic thesis of, you know, in the Goal and a theory of constraints is that this manufacturing line, this manufacturing process, is only as efficient as, as the weakest point in that manufacturing line. We know that. Right. You know, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. And so what the goal basically says is don't try to maximize each and every stage within a manufacturing. You're just going to create more work in process inventory. It says, figure out where the bottleneck is. Double down there. Now, once you freed up that bottleneck, guess what's going to happen? You're going to have another bottleneck get created further down. And the entirety of manufacturing optimization of manufacturing efficiency is simply chasing bottlenecks around throughout your own manufacturing system. Smart marketers recognize, and really, this is a really long winded way of answering a simple question. What is customer value optimization? Customer value optimization, at its heart is chasing around and solving for the different bottlenecks within the customer journey. And as marketers, we need to be able to map customer journeys, we need to be able to identify where bottlenecks are, and we tactically need to know how to solve those bottlenecks. And then when they move, we need to chase them to the next stage. And you do that enough times and congrats, you're able and willing to spend more than everybody else in your industry to acquire a customer. And they don't understand how you, how you're able to do it.

And a lot of that has to do with just mapping it out, like you said, measuring the conversion rates. Let's see how many people are transitioning stage to the next where we expect them to. But that side of it gives you one piece of feedback, right? We're able to see how well, how efficiently people are moving through that funnel and that journey map the way that we have it set up. Another aspect to that, the, I guess the implicit side of things, so to speak, is how your customers actually feel about that and getting that direct feedback from the customers that went through that journey about how they experienced that process and what could be done differently or better to make that better for the next person that comes through. So how important do you feel like it is as a marketer to have that conversation with your customers to understand that in, I guess, a deeper level.

I think it's impossible to do your job as a marketer well if you're not talking to the customers. Because, yeah, you're right, Friction will show up in the analytics. Right? Friction will show up in the numbers. The problem is, and I see this with marketers all the time, right? So here's what experience looks like as a marketer is saying, okay, this stage is currently converting at 18% and really it should be about 24%. Like, that's what experience looks like. And just doing it enough and having access to enough network, enough of a network where you can say, what should this be? And having a decent idea, that's experience, and that's important. But the problem with experience is marketers will be able to recognize, okay, this needs to be improved. But they think that the way that they improve it is through, like on page optimization, or, you know, what, we need to rewrite the series or we need to do this. And what they don't realize is they've completely missed the hook. They've completely missed the message. There's something that they're saying that is turning off the customer, and that will never show up. That qualitative data will never show up. But if you take that message and you put it in front of a customer, you know, and you say, what do you think about this? And they go, I don't know. And you kind of get like a, you know, they're not saying like, I hate it, but they're just like, meh, you know, you missed, you know, you're not speaking to their, to their, you know, to their desired after, you know, you're not meeting them where they are, you know that you're missing. And nine times out of 10, the optimization is not going to come through changing a button color from orange to green. Right? It's not going to come from going from a two column into a single column. It's not going to come from like, oh, we really need to improve our mobile experience. Even we need to improve the load rate of our page. All these things are important. But nine times out of 10, the big needle movers come from messaging. And that's why I think marketers must be copywriters. And it is impossible to be a great copywriter if you don't have empathy. It's impossible to be a great copywriter if you don't talk to your customers. So you got to get out in the field. So I think having conversations is essential. It's why I love, by the way, promoting out of customer care and even sales, you know, whether or not it's a promotion or lateral. But I love converting customer care folks, customer service folks, customer success folks, customer sales folks into marketers because they talk to the customers all day long. And if you're going to be good at that job, you got to have some empathy.

Oh yeah, 100% agree on that. It's interesting that you mentioned that we actually haven't done that transition from customer service or support and or sales into marketers. But we have done the opposite of that. We've taken some of our marketers and turned them into sales reps for us and we've seen a lot of success from that. We're a kind of a fringe case and actually digital marketer probably is as well because being a marketing agency, if you're a marketer and now you're selling marketing, it's a pretty easy transition in some cases to be able to make that switch. So we have that advantage on our side. But I like the idea of having people move around there and being more comfortable having a conversation with somebody. Which leads me into my next question. Actually, I've heard you talk about the idea of optimizing for conversations and it's becoming just more and more relevant and prominent to see a conversation occur earlier in the process than it used to. You used to try to make it as hands off and as frictionless for the company as possible where you send them a few emails, you get them to your site, you let them convert on a form and you never Actually talk to them for a little while down the road. But more and more, the idea is becoming optimized for conversations. Can you talk about that concept just a little bit more?

Yeah, I mean, so much of it is so much of business, and really probably life is just doing what everybody else isn't so that you can kind of stand out. And it used to be that all sales and marketing was basically conversation, you know, I mean, yeah, you would run ads, but ultimately, you know, ads were designed to generate leads, and then immediately you had to get somebody on the phone because this concept of e commerce didn't exist. This concept of marketing automation was not a thing. And then we realized that, wow, the technology will allow us to follow up automagically. I can send emails out into the future. And so everybody jumped on it. Why? Because it made things easier and more efficient for them. Nobody really asked the question, which, by the way, nobody ever asked this question. In the beginning, we were selfish creatures, right? Everybody said, this is easier for me. Let's do it. I can be more efficient. Let's do it. I used to only be able to make 100 calls a day. Now I communicate with hundreds of thousands. Let's do it.

Right?

Nobody asked the question. Yeah, but is this. What is the best thing for the customer? And in the beginning, when it was new and in the beginning, when it was novel, and in the beginning, when people were getting emails with their name and they're like, oh, I guess that this was actually sent to me, right? It worked just as well as a personal outreach, as a personal conversation. Well, then, as marketers tend to do, you know, we ruin it for everybody else. And so it becomes less and less and less effective. And now the benefit that you have, that we once had from scale, you get to a point where the conversion rates are so low, you know, that the benefit that you get from scale no longer makes up for the crappy conversion rates. And that's kind of. We're not there yet, but we got close enough that it caused people to say, what if I just went back to talking to people again? And then the folks who do that were like, wow, this actually is better. Well, you know, when people come to my website, if I ask them a question, it's kind of like them walking to my store, you know, if I'm there to answer their question, they're happy and then they buy.

So.

But always, always, always the pendulum swings. And I'm always asking myself, how can we not swing the pendulum all the way? How can we take the good aspects of this into this new reality. And I think the good aspects of automation is they allow for massive communication at the top level and then they also allow for filtering such that you're really only talking to the people who want to be talked to. And so that. So now we're doing marketing automation. So we'll send out emails that aren't necessarily designed to get people to click on a link to go to a webpage to make a purchase or click on a link to go to a webpage to sign up for a demo. That then is automated. Right. So we don't ever have to talk to anybody. We're sending out emails that don't even have a link. We're sending out emails that just invite people to respond and to start a conversation.

Right.

This idea of chatbots, right, What Drift is doing and companies like that of let's have automation on the front end that is just designed to get this human being to a point where it's appropriate for them to speak to another human being because we don't want to waste their time either. And so I believe that technology as a tool to make human interaction more efficient, that's really where things are headed. Technology is not designed to, you know, to. It never really has replaced humans. That's always the thing that everybody says is going to happen. Right. AI is going to totally eliminate the need for salespeople. Right. The, you know, email is going to. Is going to kill the telephone. Amazon is going to decimate all retail. No, it doesn't do that.

Right.

Does it take away from it? Yeah. Does it pull from someone's market share? Of course. Does it completely replace. No, it's never happened. We still have print to this day. Right. No new media ever completely replaces an old media. And so what we have today is marketing technology that facilitates better human interaction. And I think that's better for Everybody.

Yeah, I 100% agree with that. It's interesting seeing companies trying to find that balance. Like you were talking about the pendulum swinging back between that low touch aspect where you're doing everything in an automated fashion, and that higher touch approach, which is actually really interesting to hear you talk about expecting people or asking people to just respond to an email and following up with them that way, which is a bit more high touch, but can have a much better success rate in terms of getting people to respond positively. So cool to see that balance kind of being shaken out between a bunch of companies. And one of the other aspects that I find fascinating with it is it almost starts to Blur the lines between marketing and sales a little bit. One of the ways I like to describe the differences between the two is that marketing typically you could think about as being a one to many type of approach where it's one person or a small group of people communicating with a lot of people at once, whereas sales is once. It's two people talking back and forth to each other, generally speaking. But it's really interesting to see tools like this kind of starting to blur those lines and bringing those two teams even closer together. We actually at New Breed operate as a revenue team. So yes, we have people in sales roles and people in marketing roles, but they're on the same team. And I think that just creates such a better experience both for us in terms of efficiency and for the client because they have a better experience in terms of the messaging that they're receiving and who they're talking to throughout the entire process. And they get more familiar with us as a result.

It's, yeah, we're structured the same way and I think that's more where companies are headed. Right. This idea of a revenue team, that's a combined sales and marketing. I actually, you know, my sales friends aren't going to like that I'm saying this, but, but I believe that the category is marketing. I believe that marketers need to own the entirety of the customer journey and that sales will really, you know, come in as, as a special. I'm not diminishing or seeking to minimize the role of sales because I think sales, it's huge. Right. But I do believe that that sales is transitioning into more of a specialized role within this broader revenue category. Because the reality is, you know, today, unless you're selling the super high end enterprise type software, most things today can be sold with a low or no touch process. And so I think what that means is you're going to see a lot less traditional salespeople in the future and you're going to see a lot more people working in marketing in what we might consider a marketing role. I think what retail sales is gonna look like in the future is a lot of people in a room are working from their home, chatting with customers who are on a website where they used to hire a bunch of kids to work your retail store and they chat with people and they walk through the door. So I think it's gonna be the same, it's just gonna transition and the skills are gonna be far more digital in nature and I think they're gonna just look a little bit more like marketing, a little Bit less like sales.

I totally agree. One of the other interesting things about that is if you think about just how people are trying to buy today, that process helps facilitate a lot of that. But we're seeing more and more that companies are implementing some sort of frictionless option, especially when it relates to SaaS into their buying process. And what we've noticed with a handful of our clients and a few of the partners that we're working with is that sales enters when someone needs that additional handhold holding to make it from their free trial sign up or their freemium option of the tool that they use today to the paid version or to implementing that product across the company. And sales does great in that spot still. And I don't see that leaving. And even companies that are adopting more of a product led growth strategy or that frictionless freemium strategy, they still have sales teams that function still exists. It's just kind of being shifted into how it's applied to make that sale occurring. And it actually can make it more efficient.

I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, you're right. You said it. It makes it more efficient and it's a better experience for everybody. And it's exactly. This is not. I just, I want to, I hope everybody understand, like this is nothing new. Think about the way that you would buy a shirt, right? You, you would go like now and certainly 20 years ago, if you wanted a shirt, a new shirt or a new pair of pants, you know, you'd walk into a clothing store and as soon as you walked in, somebody say, you know, hey, how's it going? Can I help you with anything? And about 100% of the time you go, no thanks, just looking. Why? Because you, if you can find it on your own, you know what you're looking for. If you find it on your own, you just as soon go and get it, try it on, buy it, leave without having to talk to anybody. Now, the second you need help, you're looking around and you're wondering, why is nobody here to help me? Right? I mean, and it's utterly irrational and it's unfair, but we do that all the time. The same thing is true. The web, digital, it didn't change humans. It didn't change the way that humans want to buy. We always want to not have to talk to anybody if we don't have to. And we always want to always have somebody to talk to the moment we feel like we need it. That is nothing new. It has existed since the dawn of retail. And now what we sought to give consumers was the ability to buy without talking to anybody. That's E commerce in its purest form. What we found now is that they do sometimes want to talk to someone. But God dang it, we shouldn't be surprised by that. It's just humans being humans.

Totally agree. So I could keep talking with you about this all day, I feel like. But I want to end with a question I'd like to ask a lot of people, which is, what is your favorite part about what you do today?

I enjoy creating the creative aspect of launching a brand new campaign. So not necessarily a brand new product. Right. Because that's just hard and they just don't come around as often. But to take a product that is old, that everybody has heard of, and to figure out a new way to talk about this thing, to speak about it in a way that makes people who maybe had looked at it and said, no, that's not for me, like, take a second look. That to me is the favorite part, is my favorite part of it. That to me is kind of the closest that we can come to alchemy. And so I think it's fun. And I'll tell you, it starts to look like messaging.

Right?

And getting really good at crafting a message such that people go, I need to take a look at that. And then when they do, they go, I've seen this before, I've heard of this. Why didn't I buy this before? That, to me, is fun. That's when I believe that marketers have an ability to have a really positive impact, both on behalf of the companies that they find that they founded or that they work for, but as well as the consumers who really should be benefiting from this product or service. But for whatever reason, they didn't consider it because a good marketer didn't come along and explain, here's why this matters to you. Here's why you should really take a look at this. I just think that's fun.

I love it. I couldn't agree with that more. So before we end, are there any final thoughts you want to leave people with before we close out for the day?

I would just remind everybody that remember that it's always a human on the other end. B2B. People tend to forget about that more than others. There's so much to be gained by just imagining what would I want to happen if I were buying this for me, what would I want that experience to be like and trying in every way, shape or form to deliver it in that way? Also, keep in mind People only ever buy two things. They buy transformation and they buy identity reinforcement. Okay, so recognize early on, what are you selling? You know, are you selling a luxury item that people are really buying for identity reinforcement? A company I saw that did that really well recently is Superhuman. Superhuman. They're basically selling an email tool, right? The email apps, Freaking Gmail. But why do people want Superhuman? Why do they have that powered by Superhuman? Because if I've got Superhuman, then I show that, like, I'm on the cutting edge of technology, that I'm very efficient, that I'm in the know. That is a commoditized product that is working because whether they did it accidentally or intentionally, they recognize that they are selling identity reinforcement. Most products you're actually selling transformation. You got to get crystal clear on what state does my customer want to be transformed from and into. So get really good at identifying before states and after states, and I'll tell you if you can identify, if you can recognize whether or not you're selling transformation or identity reinforcement, if you can get good at identifying and articulating the shift from before states to after state, and you can get good at mapping customer journeys, then you can be a pretty scary marketer.

That's awesome. For anyone that's listening, highly Recommend Checking out digitalmarketer.com look up Ryan on LinkedIn. It's Ryan Dice. D, E, I, S, S. I got that spelling right, right?

Yes, you did. Yeah.

Please check him out. Knows a ton of awesome stuff, as you can clearly tell from listening to him. I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for joining today. We've got more great episodes on the way, so make sure you see subscribe to the podcast so you can get notified when our next episode comes out. In the meantime, check out newbreedmarketing.com for our other great resources. Thank you for joining and we'll see you next time.