Funnel Reboot

When you've founded a startup, you need to do marketing long, long before a marketer comes around.      You'll meet two remarkable founders who have built their companies' sales and marketing engine, even though that isn't their area of expertise.     Rebecca Wormleighton is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Zendelity, where she leads operations, including sales and marketing. Zendelit...

I want to share three experiences I've had and I want you to see if there's anything off about them: A while ago I sat with a RevOps leader, while they scrolled through a CRM where every single lead was tagged as an MQL. "Marketing sets them all to that," they said matter-of-factly. Sales knew, marketing knew, and everyone went along because the company was venture-backed and under executive deman...

Up to the end of the twentieth century, the only ads that appeared on a screen were the ones arranged by a handful of TV networks. They were the only ones who could sell commercials, and only the biggest companies could afford what they charged for 30 seconds of airtime. Then, about 25 years ago, some digital marketing innovations started to make a new ad model possible. In 2000, Google launched a...

Some of us are lucky enough to work in a place with analysts who can help us make sense of our data. But there are added challenges in making this  collaboration work.  Analysts may struggle with the questions marketers ask, finding them too vague for analyzing.  Marketers may get data back that they find irrrelevant; they may assume the analyst misunderstood their request. I'll grant that we can...

When I ask how someone forms their perception of a brand, what comes to mind? It might be they hear about it by word of mouth, or on an email thread or private message. In a nutshell, what's said about our company when we're not in the room, when we're not in control of the message.  Now try the same experiment with our personal brand. Is our immediate thought how to look as good as possible? Is i...

"Black Swan" author Nassim Nicholas Taleb says "understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit"    He might have been referring to B2B marketing. Think of it. Internal teams have internal data that give insight into customer accounts and lifetime value. Their agencies are close to different data: media auction signals, campaign tren...

Talk of Content marketing started appearing online around 2007. One of the few people who  started talking about it was former Funnel Reboot guest Joe Pulizzi. It wasn't until 2014 I became aware of marketers who were staking their career on the profession of creating content. I found the idea of giving-away-expertise a bit unsettling.  Maybe it was because for a dozen years prior to that, I'd mai...

Small businesses run on lean marketing teams and tight budgets, but don't count them out. They're the overwhelming majority of businesses on earth. Small companies have one function that's poised to figure out AI through experimentation, analysis and strategic changes in direction. It's marketing, and it may very well determine the winner of the AI race. After graduating from Laurentian University...

Everyone makes content now. But having content doesn't automatically mean anyone will actually consume it. There are brands with long-running programs and audiences that carve out time for their content, while other brands' programs fade because it became a thankless chore. What's different between content that's adored and content that dies in obscurity?   The brands that win make content that au...

I can't prove it, but I think many marketers wish they could improve how they're perceived by corporate leadership.  I have felt this way in more than one role, and racked my brain on how to fix it. I've entertained everything including coming to board meetings with a dozen custom-branded donuts.   Thankfully, the a solution I have come up with isn't extreme and it doesn't require donuts. I was re...

We humans like conversations that keep moving forward.  Every time we share some detail about ourselves, we expect the other person to remember it.  If they bring that detail back up in our next interaction, we feel pleased and want to keep that relationship going. Conversely, we get annoyed when they blast us with messages we had already said didn't interest us.   This is severely problematic for...

Episode 233 In the 2009 movie "Up" there's a golden retriever whose collar can translate his thoughts to speech. When Dug the dog first  starts speaking, the main characters marvel at how smart he is, but expectations drop a moment later when he snaps his head around and halts mid-sentence when he hears a squirrel.   We marketers are prone to Squirrel-chasing. Let's be honest and admit that we get...

Episode 232 There is a quiet, enduring power in wisdom that resists the urge to conform. Wise people refuse to abandon their convictions. It's not obvious who will be the Wise character in These Stories, the role often casts them as having lowly beginnings or in the shadow of others who are more powerful. But they speak out anyway, even if they are mocked or sidelined. Take: Don Quixote's sidekick...

It goes without saying that the purpose of sales and marketing is to help a company grow. We create forecasts where revenue grows a hundred-thousand, a million, or 10 million dollars.  But we expect to achieve that with incremental changes to our resources and tech-stacks.  When Base 10 Math is used to express numbers that differ by orders of magnitude, we use exponents, noted with the letter N pu...

Social media platforms can serve as both vibrant marketplaces and spaces for genuine social interaction, where consumers feel valued, while businesses boost engagement and sales. This picture may not look anything like the reality of social media that you see, but our guest will remind you that things haven't always been this way.   A short glance back of the Internet shows that in the year 2000 t...

Episode 229 We need to talk about what's been happening with the use of AI on Google and Meta's ad platforms.  A few years ago, we were surgeons. We had the scalpel. We chose the exact keywords, the specific bid modifiers, the precise placements. Now? Google and Meta are basically telling us, "Hey, don't worry your pretty little human head about it. Just give us your credit card, a few grainy imag...

How do you amplify a message when you can't lean on traditional justifications like "because we'll make a profit out of this"?   In the for-profit world, the justification for marketing spend is straightforward: you put money in to get more money out. But how do you amplify a message when you can't lean on traditional bottom-line justifications? For non-profits, associations, and social enterprise...

Episode 226 Positioning is an element that's so foundational to  Marketing, it's taught in every introductory class alongside the "Four Ps" of marketing. Positioning is meant to describe the choices a brand makes to maximize how the market sees it. Positioning is very powerful because it can set perceptions that drive customer loyalty, strong demand, and the willingness to pay a premium price.   B...

Episode 225 At the time I'm recording this it's a new year. This is a typical time when people plan what they're going to achieve fitness-wise, financially and professionally. If you're working on that last one and wonder about what marketing reads you should try, I have some marketing books that could do just the thing. There are Five in all. - Let's dive right in. Links to everything mentioned i...

Thinking up a new product and commercializing it is not easy. All products face Financial, Technological and of course Competitive market barriers. But doing this in the field of Healthcare is not like any other industry.  In healthcare, there exist extra regulatory hurdles that make product innovation even more difficult.  Before every medical device is introduced, they must find academics who wi...

The world we inhabit today is, in countless ways, an extended echo of breakthroughs made by two extraordinary cultures that came from a compact corner of the mediterranean between the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century of the current era. I'm talking about Greece and Rome, whose influence on contemporary language, thought, and culture is so deeply woven into the modern world that we navigate it ev...

We often hear marketers talk about how vital their work is to sales. What we don't hear nearly as often is the reverse: how essential sales is to a well-functioning marketing team. If marketing creates the content, sales provides the context. And that context is what makes campaigns relevant, credible, and grounded in the real world. Sales teams feed marketing the on-the-ground truth—what prospect...

Is your Brand truly memorable? Would a person who bought from you a year ago be able to recall your name or say what they found compelling about you? The reality is that a lot of brands are instantly forgettable.  You don't have to wallow in a world of Meh - you can turn your brand into something memorable - we're going to hear a process that's been codified in a book that came out in 2025 called...

Here's a question a lot of us are asking ourselves today. How do marketers build genuine, durable trust when the cost of generating massive volumes of AI content is basically zero? How can you argue for making humanly-crafted content in small quantities  When it's so easy to have AI pump it out in big quantities? The hard truth is that humans are wired to notice what other humans do. Meaningful co...