Funnel Reboot

A trend that's currently having its day in the sun is Product-Led Growth. According to our guest, it's a fine model, but our companies need growth that's based on a more foundational element - advocating for Customer-Led Growth. CLG begins with creating organization-wide understanding around what experience is most appropriate for the company's best customers. Value to customers is then delivered...

When it comes to branding, there are many facets to getting it right. But we don't have to know all about branding to know that only one mistake can cause deep, irreversible damage to a brand.  In 2009 the Tropicana juice company thought they'd be clever by taking their recognizable straw-in-an orange carton and simplify it down to an indistinct orangish object. Design critics howled and customers...

Did you know that how your message is received is mainly dependent on where people received it? This is a fact of life in an era that's framed by paid, earned, shared and owned channels, best known in its acronym form as the PESO framework. Focusing in on what we want our brand to be known for, we're soon hit with the reality that the same content plays differently when it's issued in a corporate...

If you take the United States economy as a bellwether, you can brea businesses down into three categories. There are Start-up companies that typically have annual revenue anywhere from a million up to $40 million. Mid-market or  Scale-up organizations generally have an average annual revenue of $300-400 million. Large enterprises, like those in the Fortune 500, had an average revenue in 2022 of $3...

Today we're talking about what analytics has to do with music (check out this music about analytics by songwriter Kai Feng ). We're looking at a musician's work style and seeing what analysts can adopt from it. According to today's guest, these two disciplines have much in common.   Fred Pike is a father, a grandfather and a string musician who both plays in and is president of the Milwaukee Mando...

This is the second episode in a series on having a thriving career. There is one specific subfield where this challenge is harder than usual - it's marketing within paid and organic search. There are always new tools and techniques coming along, and In our guest's opinion, to be a search marketing professional means upgrading yourself, to master them while the iron is still hot.  I'll be talking w...

There's a lot you need to deal with in a marketing career, such as:  What skills you should chase after when in an entry-level vs what's needed at higher levels How to manage both above and below your level What continuous learning actually looks like Knowing when a job isn't panning out and you need to cut  your losses Balancing whether to join a company based on the brand's cachet, the title, th...

If you want to learn about sales and start Googling, you quickly run across self-professed gurus, who claim to know the secret to selling. If you faithfully follow this method (available today only for a low low price), you'll have sales success. Despite feeling a twinge of skepticism about their pitch, you're so deep into their slick, pressure-filled pitch at this point that you pay for their boo...

How come the companies you hear boasting about their growth rarely seem to rack up impressive growth numbers? For all those that talk the talk, very few can say they have doubled their revenue in the last 3 years. And yet, according to our guest today, by simply increasing new sales by 15%/yr and selling 15% more per year to existing clients, doubling revenue is totally achievable. In the 27 years...

The relationship between those who generate creative work and the rest of us in revenue-related roles can be …strained. From those I've talked to in graphics or visual arts, being left to their lonesome makes it hard producing creative that's exactly what the marketers and other stakeholders wanted.  That's one reason why I hope you listen to today's talk with a graphic designer who wrote a guide...

"So, what does your company do?" This is a simple question, which should have a simple answer. Yet whenever I'm asked it, I feel the tug to drift into a talk-track full of feature dumps.  This, and other sales sins, lead to situations that lose potential sales. They put all of marketing's hard work at risk of going to waste. Meticulously-crafted content, research on ICPs and  intent-based campaign...

In this episode, I spoke with Danny Decker about the book he co-wrote with RJon Robins, "The Automatic Marketing Machine" which came out in 2022. The book combines direct marketing, nurturing emails and retention tactics to form a sustainable supply of ready-to-buy leads.   Danny Decker spent most of his childhood in West Africa, where his parents were missionaries. When he was young, he saw peopl...

My guest believes that online advertising gave birth to one of history's greatest frauds, and has become a threat to democracy. That's right. It's actually the subtitle of a 2022 book he wrote called AdScam .   It is the basis for our talk, which looks critically and conscientiously at the unsavory side of digital marketing.  He's not some advertising outsider wagging his finger at the industry. B...

Throughout  our youth we are subtly encouraged to fit into our surroundings, staying on the expected path of taking our studies as far as we can before getting a job. Today's guest didn't do that, dropping out of high school to go work in the retail sector.  Because she was a go-getter, she was recruited in 1997 to join in a retail experiment by a telecom carrier. At that time, cellphones were exc...

Johan van de Werken thrives best at the sweet spot between data, business & technology.  Graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Utrect, my guest started his career as a journalist for several Dutch publications, writing about everything from events and  pop culture to media, politics and economics. Around 2014 he switched from letters to numbers, working in CRO for several euro...

Consumers and corporate buyers no longer put blind trust in our brands. Nor do they trust big institutions. Nor religion. Nor the government. Nor the media. We do however still trust people like us. That's where influencers come in.  Gordon Glenister is a UK-based adviser on the business of working with influencers and running membership associations. Gordon launched the association arm of the UK'...

Data warehouses are amazing things: you can toss all kinds of information into them then pull mind-blowing insights out the other end. This feat can happen because you're connected to outside systems holding their own database tables. A copy of whatever has recently gone into the table is taken out and shot through a data pipeline and pushed into your data warehouse. But today's data stacks contai...

Think of the data you have on your customers as having value. It does, by the fact that the more you know your clients, the better you can serve them. This "unlocked potential revenue" of all your current customers can be quantified as your whole customer's lifetime value (CLV) added together.  This number is known by finance people as Customer Equity, but it's much more than a mathematical formul...

Analytics is something that everyone says they want, and some brag that they can analyze very well. But few people know what investment's required to build a quality analytics function, and even fewer are good at justifying its value.  Our guest Martin McGarry is so passionate about analytics, as you'll see from his  backstory, if anyone can articulate the business value of analytics, it's him.  A...

It's fitting, given how this is Funnel Reboot's 150th episode, that we veer off of the standard format and dig into a niche within marketing that's becoming a de facto part of every marketing function and is dictating new skills that every marketer must learn. I'm talking about marketing analytics.  This episode is compiled from experts in the world of analytics. It was recorded on location at the...

When marketers from different companies get together and talk shop, it quickly becomes noticeable that each tackles their marketing problem differently. One by one, they throw into the conversation their own homebrew of channels, output tracking and the distinct expectations their stakeholders place on them. The more this study in contrast goes on, the more you hear them ask each other: "Why do yo...

If you want to  communicate your message to others in this world, you only have four channels to choose from. Paid, Owned, Shared and Earned. If we expect to get some attention through shared and earned media, we should be prepared to face resistance, because we're competing with the biggest and most attention-grabbing stories out there. My guest Phil Gaudreau is a former journalist, who has turne...

Small-to-mid-sized businesses make up half of the economy. When surveys are done on why one company is chosen over another, buyers most-commonly cite the people as the main factor why they buy from them.  It's great that the founders or select team members are known by those buyers. But what about those who don't know them? How can they get a wider circle to know about their expertise and how exce...

The theme of these next few episodes are channels for getting our content out there.  The concept of marketing through a podcast is familiar to a high percentage of marketers (for those listening to my show, it's 100%), but it has some quirks that other channels don't.  A key issue for those thinking about podcasting is the volume of shows that already exist. There are  arguably over a million act...

What traits do humans have that distinguish us most from other species?  There are a few answers, but one I like is from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said it was our ability to form Society. In fact, he saw it as critical adaptation that ensures our survival:   "...the only way in which [men] can preserve themselves is by uniting their separate powers in a combination strong e...