How Do You Win Big On A Small Budget? (2024 Marketing Strategy)

Hey, everyone. There's this famous psychiatrist, his name is Phil Stutz. He's got this Netflix documentary.

It's crazy.

I was watching an episode with him on the Rich Roll show recently and he perfectly encapsulated the secret of marketing. And he did it in like 45 seconds. And what was so powerful about it is the exact opposite of what we all do and think every single day. We're going to dive in, reveal what that is on today's show, talk about the reasons why, and give you the step by step of how to get past the old and bad way of thinking about marketing. Let's get to show we have a very important show today, Karen, because, Kieran, I want to talk with you and everybody watching about the biggest crisis that is facing marketing today. And that is a crisis that is not the impending disruption of AI. It is not the fact that marketing channels are being completely disrupted, like search advertising, fragmenting TikTok maybe getting banned, all of these things. That's not it either. It's not the data privacy and all of the pending data and regulatory climates. It is something very, very different than that. It is something we haven't talked about much on this show that I think we have to talk about today to tee this up. I think the best thing I can do is show everybody, audio and video wise, a clip. And this is a clip from a recent episode of the Rich roll podcast on YouTube. He is awesome. He recently interviewed Phil Stutts. And Phil Stutts is one of the most famous psychiatrists in the world. Joe Nihil is one of his patients and made an entire documentary on Phil Stutts. And Phil Stutz now has Parkinson's. And it's. It was a very moving documentary but highly thought of in the psychiatric community as well as amongst a lot of like famous people and everything. And I want to show you kind of a minute from Phil breaking down his intro here is basically like, this is how you should think, think about life. And this is the one thing I know is you should think about life this way. So let's watch.

This is the right pathway to look at the world as far as I'm concerned. And it has to do with faith. The bottom of this thing is like, is called faith. Now, people don't understand what faith is. People want to have faith because it's proven to them, which is impossible. The idea is you have to have a freely chosen. You have to choose to have faith for no reason, without proof, without anything. If you do that, then you can act, which is the second level of the thing. And then once you can act, then you become confident. See, people think that they can't act until they become confident. And it's not true at all. It's part X. Just wanting to paralyze them.

All right, think was the best one minute summation of marketing's biggest problem today and marketing's biggest problem, Kieran, is that we are in a crisis of faith. And I don't mean faith in the religious term. I mean faith in our ability to do the work, our faith in the tools we have to do the work. Faith in the results we're going to get from the work that we do. Like, I thought it was brilliant how simple that was, where he was like, look, you have to have faith to act. And then once you act, you get confidence. And everybody else is like, no, no, no, I need confidence to take action. And that is at the crux of what's happening in marketing day is everybody's like, oh, I don't know what to do. I can't take big chances because they don't have the confidence to do that. And it's not a confidence problem. It is a faith problem. I have lots I want to say here, but I want to turn it over you.

For first reactions, I'm going to play the role of our listeners who are screaming into the, wherever they're listening to the podcast. So I think what they're telling us, like, I'm a listener and I'm like, I love this, Kip. I want to take risks. I want to have faith. The George Michael classic track faith kind. I want to have faith, faith, faith. And I think what they're saying to us, Kip, is it's a lot easier for you, for both of you, right? Like they, the problem that they, the problems that they have is they don't have the budget, which we can talk about. Their CEOs won't let them do anything that doesn't like that doesn't directly tie to the numbers that that CEO cares about. So it actually confines them to do a certain subset of things. The CEO and the business want short term gains because they're trying to hit their monthly or quarterly numbers. I say a large percentage of the people who listen to us are within private companies. And so they're on a tight, you know, timeline in terms of when they need to deliver results. So I think those three things we should like, I would like we should try to break those things down. Do you agree?

There's one other that I would add to your list and we're going to break it down. We're going to give everybody our best kind of blueprint to solve these problems and to have the faith and execute the way they need to. I think it is most people want predictability over big results. I think the. One of the core root cause, if not the root cause is that like, I think people would rather come in at 90% of goal and know what that 90% exactly looks like than come in at 102% of goal and win and be uncertain of how they got there.

I agree. This is where we are in marketing, funny enough. Kip, I have a LinkedIn post with a graphic going live this week that talks about this very thing. Just so you know, I didn't. I do steal a lot of your things and put them into a little graphics of frameworks. I did have this one done beforehand. So let me like pitch this to you because it's really what you're saying.

Please, Please.

Well, right. I think if you think about where we are in marketing and it's not directly correlated to faith or it's not directly relevant to the faith part, but just where we are in marketing and I try to dumb everything down into like two by twos or two, two to three Venn diagr. And so like if you just think about a two circle Venn diagram and you have on the left hand side, what's happening in tech in general is like tech companies want to get much more efficient. So the CEO is saying to the marketing team, get me savings, right? Get me savings, be more efficient. And you can easily track that. Like it's easy for me as a CEO in a company to say marketing cost me X on the right hand side, in the right hand circle, the CEO and the founder is saying get me growth, right? And that growth is becoming harder to measure because when you look at what's happening in marketing, the channels that you can directly attribute marketing success to paid and search, things like that are diminishing in returns or, and, and they're harder, they're easier to track. And the challenge that are growing, whether they're social, video or YouTube or brand or all these things where you can take much more outweighted risk are harder to track, they're much more indirect. And so marketing are somewhere are kind of like stuck in the middle of those two Venn diagrams where like it's easy to see the cost of us. It's getting harder to show the upside unless you use correlation studies, conversion studies. And I think what, and I think what you've made the point is like hey, like for the most part we've been, we've been tuned or we've been pre programmed to get the predictable return. And whether that is like 90% of the goal, 80, 85% of the goal, 95% of the goal is, it's still safer than saying let's do a bunch of things that we believe are the right things to do and we believe they will add up to the number in a bunch of ways that are hard to track back to that individual work. But we still believe they're the right things to do. And I think that's kind of the same predicament that I'm trying, that I was trying to put into that graphic.

Yeah. And I think, I think to try to be clear on that, I am saying that there is a tangible outcome here. Most folks who watch the show, they're in business to business marketing and or their founders and that so there's some type of pipeline ql like hardcore demand generation metric that they're looking at. I am telling you that metric has to be over 100%. And I think most people are coming up short of their goal and are not exceeding their goal because they're thinking about they're only willing to take actions towards that metric that they know the outcome of before they actually start the action. And that is a recipe for failure. Like one of the most valuable things that when I was like my first like month at HubSpot years ago, Dar Mashar, co founder, came over to me. He's like look, as you're doing this, just think to yourself if you had a magic wand and what you were about to do went perfectly, would it still be worth doing? And too often in times in marketing that is actually just not the case that like you know exactly the outcome and you're gonna do it well and it's still not gonna be worth doing right. Still not going to have a big enough impact.

That's a great version of the same quote. I think I shared it to you. I was talking to a great co founder of an incredible company and they said we were talking about different problems. He said this problem is just too cheap to be worth my time. And I was like, oh, that is a, I'm going to use that time and time again which is this problem is just not, it's not, you know, expensive enough, it's not big enough which means it's just not impactful enough for me to actually waste my time on.

Well, it's so hold on hold on, Kieran. The reason, the reason I'm fired up today is because you started like you're, you're playing the role of the viewer today. You started with the core constraint being money and time. Is that fair that you're like, hey.

Money, time and CEO. We should definitely cover the CEO because I think that's a fundamental part.

Can we call the CEO Bucket Agency? The ability to do what you think is best versus doing what somebody else thinks that you have to do.

Well, you have made, you have made the point on this podcast before, and it's actually in my LinkedIn post. So I'm shouting you out that the CEO is your cmo.

Yeah, it's really the cmo. I think it's totally true.

So your CEO is going to really in some part dictate the level of risk you can take.

Correct. And subsequently. So that's like the amount of agency, the amount of freedom, autonomy that marketing leader has or that marketer has to do the work. Right. Like we were saying, those are the biggest constraints. Is that what you're saying?

Yes.

I'm just going to fundamentally disagree with you where I think the biggest constraint here is actually mindset and the mindset to do different things and to manage those other constraints. You said effectively. So, for example, with the CEO mindset, is it safe to say when it comes to marketing, most CEOs has two to three things they really are doggedly.

Yes.

Caring about. Right.

And you should just quickly tell our listeners why, because we've explained it before. But I think it truly matters when you're working with your CEO to understand their background. Correct. Because if you tell me the CEO's background and I can literally tell you.

I can literally tell you their priorities without ever talking, I'll literally tell you.

Their priorities and you can save. I'll save you a bunch of time.

Let's do it for everybody right now. We'll go back and forth. I'll start, you give me their priorities and you go back forth. Hey, guys, real quick. We've gotten a ton of requests in the comments and they're all about prompts. You all want the prompts we're talking about on that show. We see you, we hear you. And now we are ready to share the goods. Click the link in the description below to access our new AI prompt library. This resource features real AI prompts that Kieran and I have covered on this show. We broke them down by category and templatized them so you can fill in the blanks and make them your Own now you have the frameworks you need to use AI, analyze ads, create brand campaigns, develop product stories, just to name a few of our favorites. Keep telling us what you need in the comments and we'll see what we can do to whip up more for you in the future. Now back to the show. All right, so it's a product focused CEO Kieran, what are they? What do they care about product marketing.

Brand and customer references. And customer references. I put that in product market.

Give me one, give me one.

This is going to give you the easiest one. My background is sales.

Okay. Sales is definitely an easy one. They care first and foremost about demand generation. They love, love, love events and they love, love, love case studies and customer references. That's what events backgrounds.

Love a good event, love an event. Just like being out there shaking hands, seeing real people. I actually do get it. Events are really great. You get to see real people.

All right, engineering, what's an engineering focus?

Spies Marketing don't know why they have to have them. They get an unnecessary evil to have a market in New York.

They hate that you exist.

No, I think and the engineering actually for the most part care what they can measure. So I think they really lean into demand gen, lean into growth, lean into the parts that they can measure.

They also care deeply about product positioning like the, the top part of product marketing. They care. They care a lot about any others that you want to do.

What other types of founder like I, you know, there's not enough market. There are market becoming more and more increasingly becoming some marketing founders but like marketing founders are again very much marketing and demand oriented.

Can we just say that of all the CEOs in the world, if your CEO has a marketing background and you're the CMO, you have the worst job.

Oh yeah, that's actually very true. Yeah.

Ye.

Don't take that job.

Don't take that job. That's rough.

That is going to be a rough.

Job because they're like I know how to do your job. You're doing your job terribly basically all the time.

Yeah, I literally have done your job and now I've also started a company. So I'm definitely better than you at all.

I'm clearly a better human being and smarter than you. So you better listen to everything I say.

And I think I actually do think if you like, if you, if you take on board what I've just what we just said and you're ahead of marketing and choosing your next role does set you up for success because you should really lean into the places that that CEO cares about in the first six months, what actually will happen is you will lead into the places that you think are important, and that CEO will look after six months ago. Oh, that person sucks. Just because you haven't done any of the things they actually really care about.

And it's not just six months. It is the first week. Do something they care about.

Yeah.

Hat tip to Jason Lipkin, who was on the show a couple months ago, like, that. He was just, like, driving urgency. Driving urgency. And I think. I think that's totally right. Okay. So we went on a little detour around, like, managing your CEO and their expectations is a big part of this. But if you don't have the right mindset of faith, and there are subcomponents of faith, kind of tackle your core constraints. And we're starting with the. Oh, you have to manage the CEO. The number one thing you have to do to manage your CEO well is to play offense, not defense. If you are waiting for them to, like, bomb your email box or slack or notion comments or however they're going to interact with you with their ideas, you have lost. The number one thing they want is for you to be in their inbox pushing them and being like, oh, our positioning is terrible. This is what I think we should do. This is what I need your help on. Those are the things. And the second you start playing the offensive instead of the defensive, you're going to build that trust and credibility, and you're going to have the level of agency you need to do whatever works you. You think is the best thing to do.

So, first of all, let's have a real good debate here for. For listener humor.

This is such a fun.

Because you. I forgot you did say something that I disagreed with. And so one thing that mindset does not help you with, Kip, is budget. I want to make sure, again, I play the role of our list.

This is a bullshit. This is a bullshit excuse.

Okay, well, just. I don't. I think most of our listeners would not agree because we've got that feedback before. So, like, you tell the listeners, the listeners who are there down with a small budget, and they're saying, I want to take risk, and this is not a mindset. I cannot get more money using my brain. Right. Like, so what. What do we say to those people?

Tell me what your budget constraint is.

Money.

No, no, it's. You are thinking that you can do something well enough or fancy enough. There is a fidelity of every good idea that works if the idea is good. There is a level of fidelity across the amount of expense that it will work. Yes. If you have more money, could you do it better and potentially have it work better? Yes. But it does not preclude you from doing the thing and having that thing be successful. Like, for example, Karen, if you look at it as a, as a percentage, like we spent like, I don't know, 40 grand to do the college football sponsorship with Alex. Right. That is a very, very, very, very, very small percent of our budget on my team. And that was. If you asked a lot of people, they'd be like, oh, that's the most successful thing you've done in the last year.

Right.

And that is like literally a rounding error. Like, literally we could. You'd lose that money. So it's like it is not always.

The best HubSpot CFO. Literally, I would just lose that money. I don't know where you. It's 40 grand here. I don't know.

That's what you get for trying to prove a point. But, but, but in all honesty, let's say you have a $10,000 budget a month, which is if you are at a very, very early stage company, probably likely. Right. That's. That seems right.

Yeah. Like, I think, like I was thinking, you have 1.2 million a year.

Yeah.

For your budget. And you spend.

That's a lot of money. You think that's budget constrained.

Well, you spend. But you spend 80 to 85% on it is counted against direct return on investment at, you know, like paid search. So you, you are, you are spending it for a X percent return. All right.

I love, I love where this is.

And so now you have a smaller amount of money to like be creative with. And I think probably what you're going to tell me is, well, you have to take money from the predictability portion of your budget and spend on the non predictable part of your budget. But you actually take risk and get.

That's actually not what I'm going to tell you.

There you go. This is a great episode because we just don't agree on anything. I love it.

What I'm going to tell you is you first have to negotiate with your CEO and cfo.

Oh God.

The results you're going to deliver on.

Okay.

The results. You're going to deliver the results. All right. Not how you're allocating the money to get the results, but the results you're going to deliver.

So I go to my CFO and CEO and I say, give me 200,000 and I'm going to give you x percent of. I'm going to get you, I'm going.

To give you a thousand qualified leads a month. I'm going to give you, you know, product marketing launch a quarter X, Y and Z. Like I'm going to give you these.

Things for that money in non measurable ways. That's the part the CFO is going.

To like I'm telling you I'm here are the measurable things. I'm going to do them for this amount of money.

We have measurable but the measurable things will not be like I can tie that dollar back to the exact incremental upside. Right? Like that's the part, that's the point I'm kind of making is the reason marketers struggle to take risk is because all of the indirect things, let's say that you the, the Alex thing, right? It's really hard to tie the dollars back. Let's say for, let's say for a company they spent that 40,000 and their budget is 400,000. The way you think about marketing is likely different from a lot of other CMOs or from like CEOs where you are willing to take risk and you are able to like tell you are able to explain that risk throughout the company. Right. And you have enough trust within the company that people just trust you. If I'm ahead of marketing and I'm like, I'm going to take that 40k 10% of the budget, spend it on this thing, it's going to work. There is going to be medium to long term upside. But I can't tell you CFO exactly how you can like draw the line.

Hearing what I am saying. Okay, all right, all right. Okay. First of all, I didn't just become a CMO and get a magic CMO hat to do all this this way. I've always done this stuff.

No, I know that. Yeah, I know.

I think that's part of it for everybody. But no, what I'm saying is let me tell you about elementary school. I really hated elementary school for a lot of reasons. You know one of the reasons I hated elementary school so much. Would you ever do like a really good math problem? Like I love geometry in like junior high school, whatever. Would you ever like do this really awesome math problem and get the right answer and but have the teacher tell you it was wrong because the work to get there wasn't what he or she wanted? Yes, I hated that. That is what I am talking about. What I am saying is as a marketer, whether I'm a CMO a VP of marketing on a marketing team. My job is to get you the right answer. Your job is as long as, and as long as I'm able to get that right answer, your job is to give me autonomy to choose how I get to the results that I have committed to you. It's not that everything has to be perfectly measured because the reason for this is once you have some agency there, Karen, then you can figure out how to make some conversion rate changes. And everything in your funnel to free up money goes to that predictable stuff. Let's say you're spending 90% of your budget like you said, on all this predictable stuff. Let's say you can make some improvements and you only need to spend 80%. Then you got 10% of your budget back to go and do something different with. To do something that is less predictable, that might get you a bigger result. And that is the point I'm trying to make.

So in that case. Yeah. So you're saying that the CEO and CFO should care about the overall chart, not the inputs to that chart. Right. So they don't, they don't care about. I will say that there are a lot of CEOs and CFOs who will want to see all the charts.

I agree. I agree with you.

So how do you navigate that? Where they're like, where you're like, look, this money is being spent in a way that is going to generate medium to long term things. It's differentiated, it's going to be the right thing to do. But you can't plot it out in a chart.

What I would honestly tell them is I would go to the old ogilvy quote, right? 50% of my marketing works. I just don't know which 50%. And I'd say like, fortunately, we are a long way away from that world. Right? And now there's a different quote, guys, and it is 90% of our marketing works. And we know what 90% works. It just works way less than it should. It's just not as good. And it's under. It's suboptimized from where we actually could be. But you don't know if you're suboptimized at anything or not. If you don't have some type of test or diverge some efforts to see if you can do better. Right. Like the, the crisis of faith in marketing is about seeing if we can do better and not assuming the ways that we have always done something is the best possible outcome. You and I know that like we get Better at stuff every month, every week, every six months to. So to assume that something that you did a year ago is the best version of that thing you could ever do is a really, really bad assumption.

This was part of my narrative in that post I was putting together, which is there is a new skillset for marketers to learn. Because being able to, like, do things and then just pull up the charts to show the predictable return is one skill set being being able to do things and paint the picture of why the things I'm doing are the right things. But you can't necessarily pull up like the easy to look at chart like you. You can look at the. Just look at the overall numbers. Are they going up? And you should be cool about that, but you can't look at the individual chart and say, well, like, here's the exact thing that we did, here's the exact input, here's the exact amount of customers. That is a whole new skill set for a lot of marketers to learn, like, to paint the picture of that strategy and why that's differentiated, why it's the right thing to do.

I agree with all of that. I would also add something that I want to see if you agree with me on this channel. I think what I'm about to say applies to 95% of the executives I've ever worked with in my life. And this statement is basically, they will obsess about the details of a chart. They will obsess about the quality of the data, the breadth of the data, all of those things. Do you agree? The same exact time, if on that same exact day, two friends, four customers, and a couple people they didn't know emailed them about the same thing that was also related to that chart, they would change everything that they are very biased by a small sample of feedback in the market and that that qualitative feedback will change action. You know, it's the old Jeff Bezos quote of, like, the truth is in the anecdotes, right? Like, you know, if data and anecdotes are in conflict, the anecdotes are normally. Right.

Yeah, most, most all of the CEO types, the one thing that they actually do have in common is they are very much driven by customer insights.

So I guess what I'm saying is, as a marketer, you control two things. You control the charts and you control the anecdotes. And most marketers just use the charts and they don't use the anecdotes.

Also, a lot of CEOs, if they, if you do something like the Alex Lieberman thing or something like that. And there's a bunch of like people saying that's cool and your brand is cool publicly. The CEO cares a lot about that, right? Like that kind of feedback, you should, you should not undervalue that feedback. Like the external, as you said, quantitative or qualitative indicators that the marketing is good are just as important. And again, I think that's the skill set to learn, right? That's the skill set heads of Market and CMOs and Co have to learn over time because we're going to get less and less of the direct attribution and those qualitative indicators of marketing doing its job are going to be more and more important. And you know, one really important thing is, you know, my time in elementary school, I actually was thinking about it when you brought it up. There was, there was a teacher, take.

Us back here, take us back.

I, I could not, I like, I don't know, this might not come as a shock for a lot of people, but I couldn't stop talking in class. Like I was non stop talker, very hyperactive, not very good, not very good at focusing. And one of the teachers seems like.

We call that today adhd.

Yeah, I know. I actually, I actually was diagnosed with that. But I, you know, lots of people get diagnosed with now, but I was diagnosed when I was a kid, which again is not surprising if you people know me. One of the teachers used to just grab me and said Flanagan and then would hang me on a door and a coat hanger by my jumper. Like you wouldn't get away with that today. Imagine you're like, what did you do? I was talking to class and my teacher literally hung me up on a coat hanger and I would just dangle my little feet, couldn't, like don't, couldn't hit the floor. And I was just dangling from that for like 10, 15 minutes is my punishment. So Irish elementary schools, a different kind of school.

I just hated school because you had to follow the rules so much. And that's kind of what this is about, right? The show today is not saying like, oh, marketing has this huge crisis of faith and you should give up everything you're doing and just have faith in crazy shit. That's not what I am saying. What I am saying is that we have gotten to the point where like everything we do has to be perfectly predictable. And man, it'd be nice if like 10 to 20% wasn't. And I don't think that's unreasonable, do you?

No. This Is again, there's a continual. If you're a listener listening to the show, you've probably picked up on a narrative, not just from Kip and I, but even from our guests. Right. Gary Vee came on, wrote the book Day Trade and Attention. Rand Fishkin came on, talked about the 1960s digital era. Like, we're gonna go back to an era where a lot of the skill sets that were applicable in the olden marketing times, like pre Internet will make a comeback in terms of old days, like 1990. Yeah, the olden days. The historical times from way, way before. It is hard to remember anything before the Internet. I was. I actually for fun. Not for fun. I love going back and watching old music videos or, like, just anything to do at old music times. You know, what's like, just amazing. And I had thought about this. This is a great business idea. So if someone wants to go do this and, like, ping me, I actually would probably partner invest, because I think it's a great idea. So I was watching. There's this famous track that was played at Woodstock, 1999. I was with Woodstock near Boston. I can't remember where it was. 1999.

Woodstock is in Woods Stock, New York, Upstate New York.

Yes.

Four and a half hours, five hours from Boston.

So there was 1999. I don't know if you've ever seen a documentary on that.

Yeah, Woodstock 1999 was the biggest mess of an event of all time.

So what actually tipped it over the edge was the song Limp Bizkit Break something. And I was watching that for, you know, interest. Olden times. And you know what's just amazing is there's not a single digital device. Right. And I was gonna put on Twitter, like, what people always ask, what was it like before we brought mobile phones to concerts? Look how much fun it was. But they actually ran, right. And burnt the place down. But I actually do think. I think if you actually created a music festival and it was called no Devices, I think that would do really well. Like, look, bring it.

Look at the Masters golf tournament. You can't. You can't have your device in the Masters golf tournament.

Oh, you can.

There's a lottery to get in.

Oh, there you go. Yeah, there you go. Music festival, no devices. What were we talking about before we talked about this?

I don't know. I got so distracted by you talking about getting hung up on a coat hanger. It's taken me a couple minutes to get past your childhood trauma of being, like, hung up on a door.

We went from hanging On a door to Woodstock. How did we make that connection?

I didn't.

There must have been something. I can't remember. We'll have to watch it back. Keep it all in. Keep it all in.

No, but to kind of reset. We've spent a lot of time talking about the crisis of faith and marketing. We talked about budgeting and financial constraints. We talked about managing your CEO and having the agency to reallocate a little bit of your time and money to go and do some things that are maybe less known. We've talked about. The reality is nothing is known is, I guess, probably the thing to talk about here is that, like, people are always in search of certainty, especially in marketing. What's the benchmark of your conversion rate for your landing page, your website, everything else. And then they treat that like it is, like written in stone, where you know that again, it is never going to change. And those things, for the most part, most of them, are highly volatile. There are certain conversion rates that, you know, don't change a ton, but for the most part, they do. And so I guess the point I'm trying to make here is not only is there is an absence of faith, there is a belief that there is way more certainty in the work that everybody in marketing is doing than there actually is and that we should. Faith is not just about having belief in something. It is, it is changing your mindset to say, what if I had to double this conversion rate with everything else being the same, same amount of time, money, people, what have you, what would I do? And that mindset shift is normally the thing that separates the top 1% of marketers in the world from everybody else.

Yeah.

It's because they're the people willing to say, oh, you know, this doesn't make sense. This should be like, twice as good. What would I do to make this twice as good? And then they do a series of things to try to get it to be twice as good.

Yeah, it's like it's thinking through things from first principles. Like, it really is not looking at things and saying, well, they're this way, or this brand does it this way, or I've always done it this way. So this is the way it needs to be done.

The amount of obsessing about what other companies do and what their, like, metrics are boggles my mind.

There is a lot of. A lot of the content that people listen to or a lot of the content people consume is just that, which is, what are other people doing? How do I replicate it? I think that is Fine. But it is not the way to. To actually succeed and gain leverage. Right? Like, I think that you take those.

That's a way to be that. That you are literally spending all of your time to be average.

Right? It's chat. You're. You're chatgpt in yourself. You're taking the. The examples from everyone and averaging them out now.

But they told me you're going to spend that same amount of time talking to the five outliers of crazy performance in whatever aspect of marketing you're interested in now. That's a good. That's a good way to use your time.

Who to take inspiration from isn't as an incredible skill set to learn and really hard to learn, so important, like, who you should actually be inspired from.

Think about doing that.

Kieran. I think it's better to have like a couple of people that you think are just incredible and go really deep with them than try to cover, you know, 50 people and take one tactic each. If you just find. I talk to people all the time. It's one of the things I've actually have got much, much better at because I've stuck. I'm stuck in Dublin. Not stuck in Dublin. That sounds really bad. But I'm not living in Miami. Although I have really started to think I would love to live in Miami. It's like my secretary, we have to.

Do a Miami trip.

We should do a Miami trip. I. Well, I'm going to speak at a conference next year. I must tell you about that. But. Oh, yeah, we should do one sooner. But. So I talked to a lot of people, right? I talked the way I actually solve problems, whether I have something I want to learn or I'm trying to figure something out. I don't really. I shortcut everything and just go and talk to people. Um, and what I've realized is actually, you'll find through that a couple of people that are just like game changers. They're just like, for what you are trying to do and what you are trying to get better at or the problems that you have, they are, you know, a 10x conversation. And I would rather have 10 more conversations with that person, like, than have 10 more conversations with separate individuals. And so it's really being able to, like, figure out, like, when you meet someone and you have to provide some sort of value as well, when you can actually go deep with that person and really learn from that person, because there are some incredible, incredible people out there. And if you can find them, then they are game changers to. To Your ability to learn to. Your ability to do things.

How do you, how do you find those people? I'll give you, I'll give you how I do it, which is a little counterintuitive and I think might be helpful for people. I don't know what the. I don't know whoever was the origin of game recognizes game. Like that quote and meme. You know, game recognizes game. But what's interesting is when I think about that, I think about like, oh, find the person you think is awesome and then find who they look up to.

Yeah, yeah.

Like this is the, that is the fastest cheat sheet for learning something very aggressively. If you find people that everybody in the world thinks are the best people at this, kind of spend a little bit of time with them, but then obsess about the five people all those people think are way better than them.

My entire goal this year is just to be the most knowledgeable person at go to market when someone says like or AI and go to market when someone says like, oh, I need to figure out AI and go to market like, oh, Kieran, he knows, he knows all the stuff. So I've been like on a crazy.

You've been on a bender on a.

Crazy terror trying to talk to as many people as I can. And I do look for same name coming up. I always ask for recommendations. Who else should I speak to? And I look for the same name coming up and I'm like, oh, that person's name has come up three, four times. That is like the person that I should just go shortcut everything and go speak to. I bulldoze my way into this in a really inefficient way where I just said I'm going to just be the most helpful person I can be. I started 2021. I would join every single call someone needed help, like usually founders or like people I can. In the, in the realm that I'm trying to learn from, not just not anyone. And I would just join every 30 minute conversation and I would try to be helpful and then I would try to figure out if that person knew things that I needed to know. Not the most efficient way to do things, but over time I've got much better. My network has grown pretty rapidly and so it's not a bad way to do it.

It's amazing that once you find those people, you can really get to them quickly if you show them a lot of value. I can tell you a funny story that I haven't told you yet. Live on the pod, you'll appreciate It. Alex Hormozi, great entrepreneur, great YouTuber. I think he's gonna come on the pod at some point. I get connected to him last week because he had a HubSpot question he needed some help with. He's a. He's a happy HubSpot customer. I get intro to him and then from. From our mutual friend Sampar. And Alex is immediately, like. Gives me the download of the problem. And then he's like, thank you so much. He's like, what's your address? And I was like, dude, I'm not giving you my address. You're gonna try to send me something. I don't need anything. First of all. Second of all, swag. Second of all, I haven't even helped you yet. So, like, why, why? Why? Why am I gonna give you my address? And he's like, I have a guy. He can find it.

This is getting.

This is a whole other kind of.

Where is this story going? You. Or I kept. Are you there in the house with you? Blink once. Yes. Get me out of here.

So. So I. I figure out what Alex needs help with. I get. I get the appropriate people involved. But I was like, alex, I need, like, 12 hours. Give me 12 hours and I will get back to you. He's like, great, cool. I'll talk to you tomorrow. And then about 30 minutes later, my doorbell rings. And I was like. I was like, why is my doorbell ringing? I was like, nobody, literally no one ever comes to my house, like, in this little quiet suburb, and it's a delivery person with a bottle of scotch.

Oh, my God.

And so I text Alex. I was like, dude, I told you I didn't need anything. And how. How did you find my address?

I've got a guy.

He's like. He's like, I have. I. I have. I. I forget what he said. He was like, I have my ways. Wasn't too hard. And he's like, thanks in advance for your help, dope. And what I would tell you. And it's like, it's not about the bottle of scotch, right? Because it's like, I don't know, you know, you and I may have a glass of that someday in the future. And, like, that's fine. But what it is, it's like, oh, this person valued my time so much, they went and did these hard things to demonstrate that. And I think that is when we're coming back to what doesn't happen in and kind of getting out of the what is possible rabbit hole and where we just think, oh, our email click. Through rate's always going to be 2.3% for eternity. You have to get to the right people and when you get to the right people, you have to show them unreasonable help and thankfulness. You have to be the person that they interact with that they're like, oh my gosh, that person memorable is the most memorable way. Like I want to help that person because I know that my time is going to be put to good use because they're awesome. That is a great tip and that is I think my big lesson from my like day of texting with Alex.

That small thing is something I'm going to start doing actually. I. The thing I do really well and it's not, I don't like manufacture it, it's just the way I am. But I think the thing people appreciate when I show for 30 minutes, I'm incredibly enthusiastic.

Enthusiastic and on time, man on time.

Enthusiastic and like, you know, up, you know, ton of energy, ready to help. Ready to help in any way I can listen. Help. I love that. But I, I think that's a great way to like ensure that person remembers that. That interaction that I'm going to actually use that and take that last thing I'll leave you with because we're kind of somewhat talking a little bit about networking. Networking is not one of my core strengths at all. I. Because the one way people do it is like, it's like events, right? I just, I don't mind going to speak at events. It's not, it's. I do enjoy it, but it's not like my. That's not how I. The best way that I meet people is have a lot of time like a real small dinner. Right. Where you can really get to know people, engage with people. You know the thing I really want to see events start to put on and you, you run inbound. So you should think about doing this for Inbound. So self serving. Kai, go dude, stop doing the dinners and do some poke events with your tech event. I will be there. I want to play some work.

This is an important thing. I don't know how much of this is going to make the final out of the pot or not, but we have the time so we're talking about it. I played golf with Dave Gerhardt recently, friend of the pod. And it was just Dave and I, we played for about three and a half hours and I left that thinking, wow. The most underrated form of networking in the world is three to four hours one on one in person.

Yeah. Doing something.

Doing something where you're not just, like, sitting around. You could play. You know, like, if you and I were playing poker for three hours, like, I remember years ago, we did, like a poker lesson. Yeah, the casino in Boston. We had an amazing time. It was only like an hour. Imagine. Imagine if that was like, when you come over, we'll go, we'll play some poker for real and some blackjack for real and stuff. But we are so in a hurry to meet tons of people that the actual hack in all of this is to spend three to four hours one on one with somebody and deeply, deeply know them. In that four hours, Dave and I had, like, come up with a YouTube show. We had, like, we. We had, like, solved like, half of the world's problems in, like, four hours. And, like, it was incredible. And you could only do that because of that type of focus in that type of situation.

I agree. This is what I want to do more of. It's obviously harder for me because I'm in stuck in Dublin, as I said.

Stuck in Dublin. Miami, baby. Miami.

Come and convince me.

I got all kinds of Miami stuff for you. It'll be great. Okay. The biggest crisis right now we have in marketing is faith and mindset to do things differently and to do things beyond what we currently think is possible before we actually know that we are capable of them or that they're going to get great results. That's what today's discussion was all about. I really appreciate everybody hanging with us for what was a very different type of pod today. But it was something that was really eating at me.

I saw.

I was watching that rich roll show and I just, like, had to do a show about it. Kieran, thanks for playing the role of the listener today. We'll see everybody next time on marketing at Screen. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa.

I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails.

And here's a task from three days ago.

I totally missed HubSpot Grow better.