[Leadership] Underutilized marketing & sales strategies to break through the noise w/ Jason Amsbaugh

I've worked with a lot of startups, I'd say kind of in my current role, so going back probably the last six, I don't know, seven, eight years now, and it feels like startups generally do a better job of having a cohesive story, right? Of having R and D essentially, that is typically sort of market led, you know, where even R and D is interacting with customers, you know, along with business development, along with product management, to really understand, you know, what it is that customers need today and how we can potentially solve that. Right. And I think that's really great in startups, again, when they're, when they are aligned around the customer and product development follows that because everything really flows from that customer experience, right. And knowledge of sort of what the customer needs to do. And so, you know, all the marketing collateral, certainly all the pitch decks are influenced by that, but also then the product roadmap, you know, really around, you know, how do we solve people's problems?

Before we get into today's show, I wanted to tell you a little bit about what we have going on over here at Succession. So Succession is a life science sales membership that includes on demand courses to uplevel your sales skills, resources to plan and execute your sales process, a community for peer to peer networking and learning, and live workshops delivered by experts twice a month. You can get access to all of this as an individual for just $79 a month or you can uplevel your entire sales team with courses and customized learning designed for each individual rep. Come and join us over at Succession Bio. Okay, let's dive back into the show. Hey, we've got another great episode for you here on the sales DNA podcast. We've got Jason, who's the CEO of Sampa Scientific, great marketing agency that does a lot of good work with different life science companies, whether you're, you know, CRO products, services or even if you're, you know, in the biotech side. A lot of great work that they do, really helping out marketing teams. And so today he shares a wealth of information, gives some advice to founders and things that they can be thinking about and focusing their messaging around their one killer application. We talk a little bit about sales first marketing, as always that we do when we have a marketing person on here and how to basically create a content strategy and distribution strategy for your company. What would you like about this one, Nick?

Well, this is not a ploy to get you all to listen to the end, but I think the way that Jason explained at the end what you need to do and what you need to focus on as a founder of a company and then what to continue to focus on as you grow in specifically for a marketing. Marketing purpose. I think that was gold dust and I think that's an education in about 1 minute 30 for a lot of people.

So there'll be a clip somewhere.

I'm sure it'll be a clip. But make sure you listen to everything. Go skip to the end. It's important stuff. Between that.

Well, let's, let's jump right on in there. Hey Jason, welcome to the podcast. We're excited to have you here.

Hey, thanks for having me guys. I'm excited to join you today.

It's definitely going to be a good one. And you, you prepped us, we prepped you. I should say a little bit ahead of time. So why don't you kick us off with the crazy or funny story that's happened in your career.

Yeah, you got it. So, so I guess quick background about me. I, I run a marketing agency now, but I actually did 10 years of field sales and then I was a product manager and I did a global market development. I would travel with distributors and reps sort of around the world in Asia and in Europe. And one time I went to India on a sales trip. So some co travel with the local reps there and, and we were working on functional, functional genomics products selling RNAi libraries. There was a top investigator they've been trying to get in front of for maybe a month or two and he'd been on their radar. He had all the funding and he had the budget for what would be like a million dollar purchase. And so they were really excited. You know, I was essentially the VIP guest coming in from out of town, could answer all the hard questions. They managed to secure a meeting with him after lunch and we were really all set for it. It took a strange turn however, we went to lunch beforehand essentially and when we came out our driver was gone and was non responsive and wasn't answering the phone. He wasn't where he agreed to meet us. And so the clock was ticking. We had to get across town with no driver. And, and finally I just had the idea of like, hey, can we take that tuk tuk right there? And, and so they, they said well, I guess we're gonna have to. And so of the four of us, three of us jumped in the back of this tuk tuk and we sped across town, you know, right. Cruising across town, just jammed into the back of this thing, you know, all suited up essentially to Go meet with this investigator. And so that was the. We made our time. We were not late, kind of arrived, just in the nick of it. But in terms of being local and taking the only transportation that we could at that time, that was definitely a memorable occasion.

Yeah, that's wild.

So many stories start with it all went wrong. And then this, right, because there's so many moving parts to being in a strange country. Normally not speaking the language and having all these moving parts and all you need to do is get to a meeting. So obviously how everything went wrong and I had to find a solution.

Another funny story for being in a foreign country on a sales trip. Go back to episode one of this podcast and Nick tells his crazy or funny story where he. What did you say? Ended up in a graveyard with a, with a granny.

A taxi just took me to a graveyard for a little while. We had to go put some flowers down. 1. I should be at a meeting. Yeah, so the whole story again, go back to that one.

Gotta, gotta pay your respects sometimes.

Oh yes, it's interesting. You kind of started it sounds like you had quite a bit of field sales experience and then moved more into the marketing realm. Just kind of curious, how do you think that impacted your ability to be, you know, a good marketer or a good salesperson? Kind of having both. Both backgrounds, yeah.

You know, prior to sales, I actually was a scientist, so I was a bench biochemist. I worked at a drug company. I did kinase inhibitor assays, high throughput sort of drug discovery merch, or a cancer pipeline. So I guess, you know, even I bring that up because it was, it was knowledge of science essentially that allowed me to be a good and a technical sales rep in terms of being able to consult and understand the subject matter and really understand what problems it was that people were trying to face. So in my sales career we took, I guess it was common sense. Selling was probably the most impactful sales training that I ever had. And it was really a consultative approach to finding customer pain points and then solving them. And so throughout my career that was something that I embraced. I thought it was great. I was pretty successful. Eventually I wanted to sort of uplevel, I guess, my sales game, as it were, from one on one interactions to sort of one to many interactions. And so that was really what, what led me into marketing. But that same approach is something that, that I try to use every day, you know, whether or not I'm doing the selling. Right. What brings you here? You know, what does a perfect solution look like? How can I help you solve that or even when we're positioning products or clients with regards to understanding essentially what are their user needs and their pain points and, and ultimately how can we solve their problems.

Yeah, and I, I imagine too, like, because I, I think there's a lot of people that you, I guess, know that there is a, you know, heated battle between, like, sales and marketing a lot of the time. But I think a lot of it comes from not being in each other's shoes as well, which is like you, if you've only done marketing, you don't really know what the sales rep is going through. And the sales rep has no idea what the marketing person's going through. And they're like, well, you've never been in sales. Like, these leads are crap and that, you know, they kind of end up with this whole battle that happens. So it's like, I feel like there's a really valuable, like, skill set of learning both or having spent time doing both. And for people out there that are listening to this should be something to think about, right? If you want to get better at marketing, you should probably get in sales for a little bit because it's going to help you really understand the customers, the kind of challenges that your sales team is going to go through. And then, same thing, if you've been in sales forever, you know, try doing marketing for, for a little while and, you know, I'm sure you'll learn a lot from that perspective too.

Yeah, I, I think that's a great point. I guess you touched on a couple things. The first is just having knowledge of the customer, right. And so I think that the best marketers, the best product managers, a lot of times they start out in sales or FAS roles or even tech support roles where they have direct experience with the end user and they really get an understanding essentially of what their needs are and how to talk to people. Right? And then the other thing, I guess that you sort of brought up is just this, you know, potential toxic infighting, right. That can happen in sales and marketing groups, right? Like, where's my leads? How come you're not following up on them? Right. Depending on sort of what side of the table that you're on, right? What do you guys even do? And, well, that's just what marketing says. But the truth is this, right? And so again, when, when marketeers have to do field travel with sales reps, for example, when they do product pitches, when they interact with customers, I feel like it helps to keep them aligned, quite frankly, and really kind of keeps Them balanced with regards to making claims, for example, that are substantiated. Right. And that they can stand behind and say, actually.

And it even extends. Often you have sales and marketing invite, but if the sales team are close enough in a smaller company, you then get the same with operations. So anyway, you can drag people into this to understand each side's point of view, it just stops that infighting.

Yeah. I think the most effective, certainly the most effective commercial organizations. Right. Have a sort of no fault mentality and a real collaborative mindset around figuring out what works best. And then quite frankly, you know, really centering in and evolving the message and evolving the approach based on that sort of current data. So, you know, one of the things that we do at the start of a new marketing campaign for a new client is listen to their sales pitch. Right. And then one of the things that we do after we start rolling out campaigns is try to get feedback from the sales team in terms of, you know, what are the key things that you say in a sales call that really, you know, kind of gets a prospect here and really makes them respond to you. Right. Because those are the most meaningful things. And if we can get that from the salesperson, then that's great. And conversely, you know, when we're trying out new messaging, if we can put that in the hands of the sales team for them to field test it live, that's the fastest way to sort of iterate and improve and evolve essentially, you know, positioning, say for a new product or new service.

I think it's so important that you are talking to the sales team. I think a lot of the time, maybe not a lot of the time, but in instances, there are situations where marketing goes off into the silo. They talk to the product team, they build some sort of like, you know, one pager, sales deck, whatever it is, and then they just like toss it over the wall and say, hey, sales, like, here's your new thing, go use it. It's like, well, we would never use this because this doesn't solve any of the questions or the problems that our customers have.

Because normally you here's your scientific dissertation or here's your piece with no science, like, go use this.

Yeah.

And I think you end up on the flip side of that too though, which is like sales reps have one call where they get one objection and they're like, marketing, go make me content for this thing. And it's like, well, that's not the solution either. Like, there's a middle ground in both of these situations. Yeah.

Yeah, you're right. You know, I've worked with a lot of startups, I'd say kind of in my current role, so going back probably the last six, I don't know, seven, eight years now, and it feels like startups generally do a better job of having a cohesive story, right. Of having R and D essentially that is typically sort of market led, you know, where even R and D is interacting with customers, you know, along with business development, along with product management, to really understand, you know, what it is that customers need today and how we can potentially solve that. Right. And I think that's really great in startups, again, when they're, when they are aligned around the customer and product development follows that because everything really flows from that customer experience. Right. And knowledge of sort of what the customer needs to do. And so, you know, all the marketing collateral, certainly all the pitch decks are influenced by that. But also then the product roadmap, you know, really around, you know, how do we solve people's problems? Right.

Do you think the challenge then comes in as you grow, the founders become less involved so like you kind of lose their story, the narrative that they've built, the reason for the company existing. And then you end up more on like corporate speak, if you will. And I don't know, there's more committees involved in messaging and it, you kind of lose the potency, I guess, of the messaging and the story that you're telling.

I don't know that you necessarily lose it, but it definitely gets a lot slower in terms of sort of the speed of iteration. I think that for a science led, you know, sort of customer led company, let's say, you know, in early days it's really easy to understand kind of why we're doing this and who we're trying to target this to. You know, if those initial product lines are successful and you have to expand them and you're looking for sort of new problems to solve, I think that the culture around sort of customer solutions as it relates to sales, marketing and even operational development, product development, I think that can become ingrained in the culture and can just be part of the norm and regardless of the size of the organization. And some companies are really good at and some just aren't, you know, but in the, in the quest essentially to maximize sort of the roi, right. And get more data, sometimes I think marketers overlook the primary source of information, which is good and successful salespeople. Right. And direct feedback from that team.

I think something I've seen in terms of the question Harrison Just asked about what's the cause of that change when you get to a bigger company. And, and what I've seen is it is the degrees of separation from the source of information. So if you're looking for the vision, you no longer hear it from the CEO. You hear from your manager who reports to somebody that reports to the CEO. If you're looking for the R D project level of importance of what we're doing, it comes seven levels down. And like you've got this weird game of I think the Americas, you put a telephone or something, right? The game where you, you're trying to pass on the message and that dilutes it so you, the companies are doing well, continue to share from the source. And that's what I've seen anyway.

Yeah, I, I would agree with that. Yeah. And I think the closer you are to that information, the better off you are. The reason, I guess why I'm really harping around marketing people talking to top salespeople is because it's, it's because of the tuk tuk, quite frankly. Right. There's so much, so much improv involved, right. In a successful sales meeting, right. Reading your prospect, understanding what they want, like, you know, hearing what their objections are, thinking through essentially what your potential responses are. At least, you know, back when I was in the field, you know, to have, you know, if you're walking halls, you talk to 20 customers a day, you know, if you're appointment based, you might have three, four, five appointments a day, you know, but all the time, essentially every one of those interactions is creating data, right. And if that begins and ends with a salesperson, they're not able to share that with the organization. Ultimately I think that that is a loss. And so I guess to your point, if around scalability, right. When we have 30 sales reps, guess what? I can't ask each one of them what's going on all the time, right. And then they are reporting up through a manager, right. Who's reporting to say a, you know, a sales and marketing manager who's then reporting back down to sort of the marketers. And so that direct line is lost.

Yeah, it's really interesting because it's really hard to collect that feedback as you start to grow. But the best feedback is always the qualitative stuff. I find it's when you try and make everything quantitative, that's when your results that you get back are like not, they're worthless. It's like close lost reason. Why'd you, why'd we lose this deal? Well, they were unresponsive, like, okay, well that's not why you lost the deal. Like that's a really useless thing. Or it's like, oh, it's always pricing or unresponsive. Right. It's like those are the two things. That's always what salespeople put. It's like when you try and collect these data points for quantitative analysis, it really waters it down. Whereas if you leverage the actual like words that were spoken in the conversation and you have that sort of qualitative feedback and you get enough of those data points, then you start to see trends that are real.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. Right. And that's an issue affected by scale as well. Um, you know, when I run a, a HubSpot or a salesforce report essentially of deals lost and reasons why. Right. Then all I see is pricing and competition. You know what I mean? That basically pop up. Right. Without, yeah, any, any additional color essentially behind those deals. Right.

Related to pricing. Like what was it related to pricing? Was it, you know, payment terms? Was it budget compared to like what was the alternative that they were looking at? Right. Like there's all sorts of nuances behind the scenes that you don't get in a drop down. Yeah.

And you know, a lot of times, I mean, when you're dealing with higher priced products. Right. It ends up being competition for budget. Right. As opposed to a specific.

Right. Like it's no longer used on this other project instead. Right. Yeah, that's it.

Right. So, you know, was it genomics or proteomics. Right. Essentially that we're going to like pursue, you know, try to get more data points with. Right. It's not necessarily that your genomic platform, your genomic tool set was too expensive, right?

Yeah, I think that's actually a really important part or like really important thing to call out that I think you understated, which is that you may not lose to budget. Like from a budgetary perspective for this one project, you might be losing that budget to go to something like altogether different. Right. So it's not like your pricing was wrong or you didn't have the right price point or they didn't have budget for it. They didn't have. It wasn't high enough priority for them really. It's a prioritization that you lost to and that you weren't solving the most high priority problem or your solution wasn't the one that they thought would solve that problem priority the most effectively. Yeah, A lot of sales reps get caught up in like the, like the, the, the direct response that the customer says that the pricing was too much or something. Right. Versus like the underlying, you know, message there.

Well, of course, if you're selling something that's like a, let's say a 30k project to AstraZeneca and they're saying it's too expensive, there's no way they don't have 30k available.

Right.

If you're selling a million dollar project to a company of two people, maybe that's actually true. But rarely is that the case. So it has to be priority. Sorry.

No, I think that's true. Right. Projects change, approaches change. I think scientists on drug companies are prone to following sort of research fads. Right. In terms of sort of specific techniques. So, you know, so I think an important thing for companies is to really understand kind of where the market's at and position themselves as well as possible around sort of a killer app. Right. Like what's really trending right now, what's really important. You know, maybe another thing to consider about budget is just that so many of the tools that people are using right now just generate a huge amount of data on the back end. Right. And so while the service might only cost 30k for example. Right. The follow up analysis and studies and the implications and basically like making that sort of serviceable and getting to the end result, I mean could be months of sort of personnel time on top of that. Right. And so, you know, I think customers increasingly are sort of dry labbing, you know, kind of the experiment. If we do this and we find this, then what are we going to do with those results and how is that going to impact our, our program, you know, as they're considering these different technologies and options and places to spend their money.

Yeah, that's a really good call out. I like that. One other question I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on because you obviously work with a lot of different marketing teams which would be what are some underutilized strategies or channels or tactics that companies don't really think about? I think you think of the normal thing is like hey, we're going to run paid ads or we're going to make content or we're going to go to events, but maybe there's some underutilized channels, tactics that people should be considering.

It's a great question and I guess I sort of think I might maybe answer this in a little bit different. There's a lot of things to spend money on from a sales and marketing perspective. More field travel. Let's go to more Conferences, you know, let's do more webinars, let's create more content and sort of promote it. So maybe a couple things here. One is an umbrella content strategy. And so the idea there essentially is that we can start by say, creating. So you could do this in a couple of different ways, but you might write a new white paper, an application note or a case study and it could be pretty thick and pretty dense and breaking that then into say, multiple blogs, you know, so you get four or six blogs essentially out of one white paper. Each one of those blogs could be advertised via four different social media posts that are emphasizing different sort of aspects around it and subsequently turned into sort of multiple email blasts to sort of promote that content as well. So I guess really what I'm seeing is the reuse and sort of iterative digestion of very meaningful content into different bite size sort of products. That was a long way towards meeting customers where they're at. Like, I don't want to read your 10 page white paper, you know what I mean? But, but I'd be interested in your LinkedIn posts and I might even read your three page, you know, your three minute blog on it after the fact. And if I'm interested in that, that'll get me into the funnel. And so it doesn't necessarily create a whole lot of time or a whole lot of additional time again because you've done all the hard work up front, but you can get a whole lot more mileage out of existing marketing content, whether it be a poster or a talk or a publication or something that already exists, or something very academic or sciencey in nature. So that's definitely one thing that comes to mind.

It's interesting because you're, you're almost, you're almost creating some of the distribution of the original asset as well through this process. Because I mean, I think one of the biggest challenge, one of the big, I don't know, things that people do that is not great is they will create this asset, spend a bunch of time and money on it, and then send it in an email and put it on their website and be like, well, why is nobody downloading this? Or why is nobody, you know, why is it not generating the interest that we thought it would? It's because there's not really a distribution strategy for it, right? So it's like there's the content strategy, which is how are we going to create what type of content, the content pillars, what content's going to come out from it. But even just like creating those other sub pieces of content. You're also then subsequently saying, okay, this means we're also going to be doing emails, social blogs, right. These other sort of channels for the distribution of it.

And that's something I think, you know, whether or not you're sort of marketing aligned, you know, we build marketing funnels. We really think about sort of, you know, how do we go from awareness and education to inspiration and then reassurance. Right. While the, the copy basically gets longer and more technical at each step. Right. Every time we choose a show like to watch like on Netflix or whatever. Right. We're going to watch the trailer first. You know, it doesn't negate the fact that there's a two hour movie behind it that I may or may not want. Right. To watch a one or two minute sort of trailer. And so I think, you know, in that trailer, quite frankly, you would have a 30 second commercial that you might see on TV, if anybody watches TV anymore. But ultimately, I mean, it's a similar approach, I think that we experience in a lot of aspects of our lives. You know, do you read the book review and then maybe the inside cover of a book before you actually read a book? You know, before I invest, you know, six or eight hours of this. Right. I want to make sure that I enjoy it on the first couple of pages first. And so that to me, I guess is sort of a similar approach and something that makes sense. I think if you take it outside of the confines of what is good marketing, quite frankly, it's like what do I as a person, you know, how do I evaluate how to spend my time? Right. A limited resource for all the things that are competing for it.

Yeah. I think there's so much noise out there right now too. Right. So you have to find a way to get your piece of information to fit into all that noise and stand out somehow.

Yeah, no, you're totally right about that.

A slightly separate question for you. So something that's probably been a, maybe a bugbear of mine and I, you can enlighten me slightly. Is that often having a conversation around sales and salespeople want leads from marketing all of the time we want leads, we want high quality needs, we have great leads. Other people in the company are like, we need to grow this company as a bigger entity. And to do that we need brand awareness. And sometimes they seem like competing objectives and like you're doing brand awareness, everyone's moaning where there's leads or vice versa.

Can you.

Do you think they can be done at the same time or do they have to be distinct actions for a different outcome?

I think they can be done at the same time and sort of in parallel, I guess. You know, the. When I think about sort of awareness, I kind of think of like, cover fire, almost like if you're going to war and somebody, you know, cover me. Right, right. And like, the guy, you know, the soldiers are crawling on the ground, right? And some guy's up there waving his gun around, you know, and he. Basically, what he's. He's doing is it's kind of distracting everybody and capturing the attention. Right. Of, in this case, the opposing force. Right. But capturing the attention of an audience, you know, with regards to brand awareness and trying to just make people aware not only that the company exists, but quite frankly, the second step, and this is often overlooked, is like, what do they do? Right? Like, there's. There's a ton of big companies and some publicly traded ones, and I see their logos. It shows. And I'm embarrassed to say that sometimes I don't even know what they do, but all I know is that they're here again. You know what I mean? They're here again. They got a, you know, a quarter acre booth, you know what I mean, again. And, you know, but really, like, what are we. You know, it's. It's. It's more difficult to necessarily understand, I guess, you know, sort of what it is that they're doing. So awareness, you know, in the form of banner ads, in the form of conferences, in the form of, you know, paid advertisements, I think is easy to do, you know, if you click on any one of those or if the copy itself calls a strong. So we're called to action in terms of learning more and engaging. And again, if you're. If you're trying to solve people's problems and it looks intriguing, right. And people start clicking on it, now we're actually generating leads and we're moving from that. Okay. They're a company into a company that can help me. Right. And ultimately. Right. We go a step further than that. They can help me, and I'm interested in talking with them. Right. And those are where those Glengarry leads come, you know, for all the salespeople out there.

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of, like, marketing ads or just like, a lot of copy in general was very, like, me, me, me, focused, right? It's like, we do this. These are our capabilities, these are the specs, this is the data we can generate, whatever. But you. You highlighted something when you were just chatting there. It's like, hey, can this solve a problem for me? Can this solve my problem? And that is what people are asking when they're, you know, they have problems that they have on day to day. Like, I need to get this solved. They're not going around thinking, I need a mass spec that can, you know, run this many samples, right? They're like, I need to run this many samples or whatever. You know, I don't, you know what I mean? Like, they have their, their problems. Like, you need to be able to solve those problems. And so your messaging should align to those things. Sales or marketing people forget to think.

Would I read this?

Right?

So here's a load of stuff I'm going to put out there. Would I read this? Because most of the stuff that goes out there, I'm like, matt, this is dull. It's not interesting. There's nothing capturing my attention and I think all I can think is they're.

Just hitting send, but you can barely read. So that's more of a use link.

No, because I have Google transcribe and.

It will read back to me.

It's fine.

There's a shortcut for that. Yeah, you don't. Of the things that I think about too. I mean, not only is it Dolan, is it exciting, is it interesting, right? But like, you know, when you start to direct that stuff at customers like, like, is there a value add? Can each one of your pieces provide some amount of value? Like, are you, are you better off? To your point, Nick, having had Google read this back to you, are you better for having listened to it? You know what I mean? Is there something that you didn't necessarily know before?

Yeah, I think. Well, that kind of leads into another question that I wanted to ask, right, which is we've talked a little bit about what can you, what are some of the mistakes people are doing with a messaging perspective. But what do you kind of see where. Let's say we had like, we got like 100k we want to spend on marketing or something, right? Like, there's a lot of marketing money and dollars that get wasted. Where, where do you see? Because I think you have insight into a lot of other companies and how they do this stuff, right? So it's like if you're in one company, you don't really know like what everybody else is doing. So I think you have a unique perspective that you can share. Says, hey, this is like trends that I see across these different companies, like, where are we wasting money and what should we be sort of evaluating more closely?

Yeah, A great, great question. So early in my career, I remember one time I, I worked at a company and they probably spent $110,000 ish, like creating a 3D animated video that was like four and a half minutes long. And so I asked myself, would I want to watch this? You know what I mean? Like, like having seen it essentially one, it was like, how did that get me closer to actually like wanting to do business with this company, understanding how they were going to solve my problems and ultimately it didn't. So expensive media, I guess comes to mind. You can do a whole lot of back to your point, Nick awareness advertising or sort of third party advertising that doesn't necessarily have a strong call to action. It gets your logo up. But again, if they're not bringing people in, it's not going to be generating any leads. Conferences are a great way to spend a huge amount of money. Conference sponsorships, quite frankly, you can be a platinum sponsor of a conference. I guess one time I saw a company I worked with probably spend $60,000 to sponsor the Internet cafe at a conference with 2,000 people. And so it definitely, in terms of brand awareness, it got their logo up, you know what I mean? In all the places, I think that was it. It didn't necessarily connect to the products that they had in that portfolio that were aligned with that sort of, you know, customer base. But those are definitely places that one could spend money without necessarily showing a whole lot of returns.

People say we have to be at this event because everybody else is there, which we talked about with other people on this or like different event strategies. Like definitely go back to some of those episodes if you want some tips there for, for everybody listening. But like you're, yeah, like you don't need to go to events. It's not like the only channel that you have at your disposal. And yeah, I'd say always evaluate these sorts of things and don't just go off of what might have worked at one company or another.

I mean, I think that's a good point. The. There is something, I feel like there is something to be said just for showing up. Right. And quite frankly, I think for a salesperson just to show up is probably the most important thing. Right. You know, that being said, sometimes you can do as much damage by sending one or two people sort of discreetly to an event as opposed to getting a booth, you know. And I think it's, it's sort of noted across the industry generally boost traffic and sort of the efficacy of trade shows. I think it's generally on the decline right now, so. So I would vote yes. If everybody else is there, should you be there too? I would say yeah, but that doesn't mean that you need to, to outspend them, quite frankly, for that to be effective.

That's a good point.

I think somebody said, made me think back to the beginning of something you said as well in this podcast when you started this. You talking about how having a good story and a good understanding of what your product is. Do people understand what your product is when you put your position out there, then you talk about spending 100,000 on a digital video for four minutes.

Right.

I think the problem there is if you don't have the first thing, it doesn't matter how much you spend on the banners, how much you spend on the advertising at a conference, if you don't have your product understood for your market, you don't have your, your story for how you position it, then no matter how much money you spend on all of the other things, it's always going to be wasted funds.

Yeah, and I think that's really true. And I guess recently, you know, as I've gone to some conferences, you know, where that really, really seems to be playing out is, is in this sort of dearth of data interoperability and AI sort of companies. Right. Around sort of clinical data analysis. Right. It's, it's difficult for people to explain how their software company is different. It's difficult for them to sort of explain why their AI is better than anybody else's AI. Right.

It's actually AI.

Yeah. And, or if it is. Right. I mean, because it's all shrouded in basically open source plus trade secrets probably. Right. You know, some sauce, I'm sure. Right. And then a step further, you know, they're doing work with hospitals and, or pharma companies and so then there's no proof points. So not only it's like at the end of the day, it's like I can't tell you what I do. I can't tell you how it's different than the competition. I can't show you any wins or case studies of essentially how this gets laid out, you know, but I have a 40 foot booth. It's just conference, you know what I mean? Like, and, you know, and, and I would love to schedule, you know, some time with you and dig into how I can, you know, address all of your enterprise software concerns.

Yeah, that's good. Well, we're, we're coming up on time, actually. Time has flown by. I Didn't even realize we're already at that half hour mark. But why don't we end with one last question, which is what advice would you give earlier stage founders in order to, I would say maybe like in a two parter, which is one, what should they be thinking about from a marketing perspective? Like how deep should they be going on it? Maybe something there, but then also how do you keep the narrative and story and things throughout the rest of the organization and how do you stay close to the action so that way you don't end up in the situation we talked about earlier? We kind of have this watered down message that isn't really differentiated.

Yeah, great question. So I guess for early stage founders, I would say, you know, if we can identify and really focus on that killer app and have some early wins in a pretty small niche and become sort of famous for that, one thing that plays a huge part, I think, in early company success, both from a revenue perspective as well as like an awareness perspective. Right.

You just have to talk about it a lot too, Right. Because it's like what do they say? You have to say something like 20 times before somebody or they have to see something 20 times before they even think about it in the future, like before they recognize it.

That's absolutely it. Right. So early days, quite frankly for a company is really going to be a lot of product marketing and not necessarily a whole lot of company level marketing. Right. I really want you to know about the product and how we solve the product. And so I think by, by limiting the scope of what you're talking about and to your point. Right. Expanding the touch points and always talking about that one thing. Right. Ultimately you're going to be known as, you know, you're the guy that is famous for that one killer app.

They come to you for that thing when they need it.

Right? Yeah, exactly. Right. And I feel like as you sort of, as you grow from that, then it's an easier company narrative to say. That was our first, you know, that was essentially the beachhead. Right. And that was what we're good at. But the core competencies of the company are different and varied than that. Right. And we're going to start to move in these other sort of application areas, but really talking about that one killer app all the time on every channel, quite frankly, again and again and again, and really showcasing how it can have a meaningful impact, I think is probably the most important thing. Early on, the other things, I guess that you said in terms of how do we retain that, like I said, core competencies of the company. Sort of embracing that, building that into the narrative. Quite frankly, that was our first move. And here's the other stuff that we can do and here's the future. Right. And keeping that sort of innovation mindset. I think, like I said, building that into the company culture and backing it up with regards to products and your interaction with customers will go a long way, I think, towards, you know, word of mouth referrals, quite frankly, and being able to expand pretty quickly, even within a narrow niche.

That is very well said. I think anybody listening got a great clip. We'll probably clip this, put it on social media for all the founders out there that are thinking about marketing. So, yeah, Jason, switch my face over.

Switch my face over with Jason with some AI and make it look like I said it.

Where suddenly I thought nobody would believe it. Nobody would believe it. It was way too eloquent. True.

I'd have to say in it a few times.

There you go. I like that.

Well, thank you. Thank you very much for your time, you guys. That was a pleasure to join you today and yeah, look forward to keeping in touch.

Yeah, talk soon. See you.

Thank you, Sam.