Funnel Reboot

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...

Video is the most persuasive medium there is. That's why Many of us are building our marketing programs around it. Inevitably, the wildcard that crops up when we have an idea for a video is what will it take to produce it? The answers to this are all over the map.  How much production value it takes is - as much as is needed for the video to produce your desired results.  The impact a video has is...

As my eldest son has been in university, he's worked part-time at a sporting goods store. The section he works in is the category-leader in the store - as you can probably guess - it's shoes. Need to admit that I'm not that into shoes.  I am fascinated by the conversations my son has with customers when it comes to shoes. They not only talk about the design features of a specific shoe. They also c...

For several years running, noted marketing expert David Meerman Scott would access all the corporate press releases captured by major wire services . These covered product launches, major client signings and other moments when companies would talk about what distinguished them from their competitors. He posted his analysis of all this data and, without fail, almost all of them chose the same words...

Our guest says that marketing  has a problem: "I think there's an over-reliance on people's opinions at the expense of creating a vision and sticking with it." and he claims this hurts our ability to build brands that get strong traction. Already a published author, he devoted his second book to this argument. The book's title is his plea to marketers: "Stop Listening to the Customer: Try Hearing...

Regardless of when you're hearing this, it's safe to say that you're running into content generated by AI. There is a lot of good brought by chat tools, but there's one thing we want coming through in our content - that is to sound human. What engages people is content with personality, content that evokes a response. And that's what today's guest will break down for us. When Alison Ver Halen foun...

We're ending our series on advancing analytics today. We'll focus on the software that, for many marketers, is at the core of this field: Google Analytics. It was introduced in 2005 as a read-only tool that tracked basic info on websites. The name has stayed the same over these last 18 years, but so much else of Google's technology landscape has changed: they have released many other tools:  Tag M...

Today we'll talk about automated marketing data pipelines for reporting and even activation. If that last sentence didn't make total sense to you, don't worry, our guest is going to tell us why we need it and how we can set out implementing it.  The place where Noah Learner got his start was on the island of Nantucket.  It's around 20km (15 mi) long, which is small enough that most visitors leave...

You have strategized and run a program with positive results, you would think that you simply show leadership your data and then you can sit back while they lavish you with praise. Not quite. If it isn't packaged right, it won't have that hoped-for impact. Remember Maya Angelou said 'people will forget what you said...what you did....but will never forget how you made them feel.' That feeling is c...