I honestly don't know why I do the countdown, because like it doesn't matter, like I think it's great, I can cut it. Uh, go ahead whenever you're ready, sir.

I love it because it makes me feel very official, like we're doing okay yeah, I might actually leave this part in.

This is how all of our episodes start.

Just a nice little countdown kind of thing. Hey, welcome back to Marketing Qualified. I'm Mike Griffin and I'm Chris Newton. And Chris, you have something that is only describable as a eyebrow-raising question that you wanted to lead off today with what the hell are you talking about here?

Yeah. So, in the spirit of marketing, we'll try to take things back to marketing as much as we can. Every marketer is pressed for results on a weekly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, five-year basis. It just never stops needing to produce results for your company. So I always find myself, as a marketer, constantly trying to balance, like the immediate gratification, like we need to get this done now. It's going to get results now, and you know we need this done now to like kind of meet our goals in whatever period we need to reach them in, versus things that I know will pay dividends in time but they take time to build.

In my experience, most good marketing campaigns, anything that's worth doing, takes a decent amount of time. It might not pay dividends this quarter, but then next quarter, next year, so on and so forth. Laying the groundwork now will lead to positive results in the future. So I came across this question that I thought was interesting earlier this week. So I'm going to ask you, Mike, to kind of go through your thought process on this and kind of what your thoughts are on it. So the question is would you rather be given $1 million today or given a penny today which doubles every day for the next 30 days?

I mean it's a million dollars. It's not even close, right, If you get that million dollars, like what I mean there has to to be, there's got to be a catch. But like who wouldn't want a million dollars? Now there's a penny. A penny is one cent. A million dollars is a lot of one cents. Like what is the help me?

that's fair, yeah, yeah, I mean, if you have, you know, a penny that doubles, like tomorrow it'll be two cents, two days from now it'll be four, four cents, on and on and on tips talk, walk me through your thought process. So, like you would rather have a million dollars today, well, I guess, what would you do with that million dollars? Let's say you know you're given a million dollars, both personally and to spend on marketing. How would you spend it in both instances?

Good question Personally. First thing I I would do this is such like a lame answer, man, but I, I would I would invest it in like an ira or something like that. I've been thinking you know a family guy looking towards the future. You got to make sure that your family's well taken care of. That's probably thing number one. Thing number two is I'd probably buy a little bit of a bigger fucking apartment in new york city. Heaven forbid you own any kind of piece of property. That would be another consideration there, although I don't know that, honestly, a million dollars gets you particularly far in that realm, in this geo, in this environment, right In this economy.

A million dollars in New York City probably gets you an extra like five feet or something you can have a really nice happy hour if you wanted to, and then so professionally and for marketing. Uh, this is actually something we're going through is a bit of a pain point in my current job. I would invest in content creators man, like internally, like we have. We're a global company and yet we have one single content shop that's based out of the new york office and, frankly, they're amazing content producers but they just inherently don't have the thumb on the pulse of what's going on across the different regions. So, like a regional specific content creator that actually is an SME in that area, I think would be super valuable to have.

I wouldn't invest it in like current variable channels or anything like that. I would actually put it towards like overhead, if you will, and really strengthen the content creation abilities of us within content specifically, I think I would invest in like a multimedia content specialist. I think that we're far enough along now with AI and that type of stuff that you can get to a decent point with written content. But other stuff your video production and audio first format, that type of motion I think is super underfunded at the moment, at least in some of a lot of the B2B organizations that I'm seeing. What do you think?

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I mean it's any company can put up a blog, but a lot of companies struggle with especially B2B just struggle with video, struggle with with audio, like podcasts, you know all that kind of stuff. I think podcasts are a great way to kind of stand out a little bit and honestly, like not a huge investment to to get stood up. Like you and I probably spent what like maybe less than a hundred dollars total between the two of us on like getting all this stuff set up. You can get software for like 10 bucks a month. You know decent not you know state-of-the-art microphones, not like super, you know like sound engineer microphones or whatever you know decent enough microphones to get started for like 30, 40 bucks on Amazon. And uh, yeah, I mean pretty much all you have to do is you know it just goes back to my example that I'll get back to is you know it does take time to build an audience. I think right now we're at what probably like 10 downloads and nine of those are probably us testing it, and one of them was one of our wives who was curious what we were up to or something that's about right. But yeah, I mean it's definitely a great way to to build an audience. Once you get going and you know it's not a huge time, it's not a huge, you know monetary investment upfront it can be a little bit of a time investment, like you have to plan out your episodes, figure out your niche, what you want to talk about, who you're talking to, you know what your what's your ideal audience looks like and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, it's, it's definitely the kind of thing that that builds over time.

And you know I'm I'm constantly listening to podcasts. I probably spend four or five hours a day or not not a day, but four to five hours a week, sorry on just listening to audio in some capacity, whether I'm commuting or listen to podcasts or even just listen to a good audio book or something like that. But to get back to the original question, so given a million dollars today to invest, spend whatever you want to do with it, versus getting one penny today which doubles every day for the next 30 days. I know that you podcast listeners can't see this, but I'm going to share my screen here with Mike just so I can see his reaction. First of all, all the tabs I have open right now.

I think there's at least 30 right now.

This is anarchy. What is this?

Yeah. So if you take a penny, double it every day for 30 days. By day 10, it'll only be worth five bucks Obviously not anything to write home about. I could probably make five bucks by betting on March Madness today alone, but by day 20, you're at 5,000 bucks Again, still a far cry from 1 million, but thanks to the power of doubling and compounding and everything, by day 28, you're actually at 1.3 million and by day 30, you would have 5.3 million if you would have taken the penny that doubled every day. You still want that million dollars today, mike, or you want to give it 30 days?

uh, yeah, give me that, give me that penny. I'll pick the penny up off of a fucking walmart parking lot now I don't care. Oh my god, this is crazy. This is crazy. People google this, look up the compounding and wild wild. Yeah, good things do take some time to come to fruition here, monetarily and just value wise. This is this is a really good. This is a really good thing to illustrate right Next time you're pitching something that isn't going to have like an immediate ROI Cause we all know how often marketers get asked for that. I mean, that's it's a little abstract, but I think it illustrates the point really nicely.

Yeah, definitely, I mean that's that's exactly where my mind went when I kind of saw this stat, because I mean I think something like I can't remember the exact percentage, but I think it was something like 60 to 70% would take the million, like you, whereas I guess people who are better at math than either of us would take the penny.

They know that by 30 days it'll be worth way, way more.

But yeah, I mean I'm always constantly thinking about this with marketing, because I just started a new role a couple of months ago and I'm trying to have an immediate impact. I want to be able to show some results for some of the work that I've been doing, building out some of this stuff from scratch at this new company versus. I know that I need to be setting the groundwork for campaigns that are going to pay dividends six months, 12 months from now, because the less you invest in the future now, the more you have to kind of make, you know, play catch up in in the future, and you know you're kind of doing yourself a disservice. So I like to kind of pay it forward to future Chris to you know, make sure that he has maybe a little bit of an easier job a year from now when he's looking back at 2024 performance and he's got some good results to show, but also a pretty good pipeline of performance that's going to be coming down in the next year.

That's real. I mean, you make such a good point about solving for, first of all, future you, on behalf of future Chris, nicely done. He appreciates you very, very much. The foundation for future success. And then I think it's an important distinction to make, though right, solving for the long-. And then I think it's an important distinction to make, though right, solving for the long term. I think about that in terms of, like your primary KPIs.

So more and more marketing organizations, if they're savvy right are moving towards an influenced pipeline, whether that be numerical quantity of ops created or percentage of ops that get to a late deal stage, or even something just like a quantity of marketing influenced MRR that's created quarter over quarter is the typical timeframe, right, and that takes time to come to fruition, right.

Like in a company that I know quite well, it can take anywhere between 90 to 140 days to get from a marketing qualified lead status all the way through until opportunity creation. So if you're generating MQLs via a webinar, for example, like the ROI is going to look like shit at first. It just doesn't happen overnight, which is why you have to look at things like leading indicators, right. Look at trends. Do some forecasting, like that penny is going to double in value each day of those 30 days. You have to build your models out like that and be able to effectively communicate that to people that are further up the chain and closer to the balance sheet type of view of the organization that you're at. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I definitely agree 100% with that. You know I'm not a fan of, you know, either first touch or last touch attribution. I like to look at things from different angles and, most importantly, I mean just it can be hard for some marketing campaigns to tie back to revenue, like like Mike mentioned. But you know I try to tie anything back to revenue as much as possible, like with some degree of certainty. Just, you know, in work, in work backwards from there, because that helps to know whatever you are investing today, are you spending too much, are you spending too little? But also, if we can incrementally close the gap by putting out more SEO-focused content, that it's going to be. It might take six months to rank, for example, or it might take six months to start getting any meaningful traffic, but if you lay the groundwork now, then you know in the future you don't either need to spend as much or you can even improve over. You know what you're, what you're currently getting. So, yeah, I definitely agree Right.

SEO is such a good example of that too, because, if you think about, like you said, it can take time to build up authority, get a specific page to rank particularly strongly and what have you.

But then one of my favorite experiments to do is look at okay, we know that Google encrypts the actual queries that typically lead people to the site where they convert right, and you can do some reverse engineering. You have to use some best guess is what I'm trying to say to figure out what the specific query that the page was optimized for, that they found you via organic search on that led to the conversion in the first place. But you can get pretty close and if you overlay that or, sorry, if you juxtapose that with the cost the same amount, the same query if you were to bid on that in Google ads I like to show the cost savings as well from an organic standpoint, where it's not just about, like the ROI, of investing dollar in, dollar out. It's also about cost savings, right, when you could bring your cap for a lead to $0 because you brought them in organically, versus bidding on a comparable type of phrase in Google ads. I think that's a pretty compelling case for playing the long game and solving for for different channels.

Yeah, that's. That's a great point. I love that.

That's awesome hey speaking of things that you love. It's a pretty good segue into our next little thing here. What do you have in mind?

Yeah, I was going to say let's segue into our next segment. So this is a new segment. Obviously, a lot of these segments are new because this is a new podcast, but just thought of this one. So we're going to do Fuck Marry Kill. So, in Fuck, in Fuck Marry Kill, mike and I are both going to talk about a marketing tactic, strategy, campaign, whatever that we fucking love, although we might not be attached to it forever, but we fucking love it now.

One that we would marry, being something that we tried and true, you know we love it. We would do it, you know, until the day that we die, or until that tactic happens to die Like SEO is dead Not again, not again, I know Right. Happens to die like seo's dead. Huh, um, not again, not again, I know right. And then, uh, and then uh, kill. Like what? What marketing tactic or strategy or campaign would you just want to fucking kill, like what should be shot in the head right now, never to return, um. So, yeah, let's start with uh. Should we start with fuck? Sorry for any parents listening, we do have the disclaimer on that. This uh episode may contain language. So, um, that's on you if you didn't notice it.

That's yeah, we take no responsibility. Uh, yes, we should absolutely fuck first, of course.

Yes, fuck first, right, all right, uh, I'll let you go first.

I'll let you go first on this one okay, right now I am hot on repurposing trainings that have been delivered internally to skill up like a sales or an account management or a customer success type of organization and just repurposing those to be prospect facing.

We're having some success with this in my current company and the impetus here is like if you are trying to help your own people level up their understanding about a problem that your customers ultimately need to solve for, to deepen their understanding of it, to help them navigate the intricacies of these problems that exist, then guess who else is going to benefit from that type of Intel right? The prospects that you're trying to bring to you and get you to pay. So I am huge. We've done this in a couple of different formats, mostly via like a webinar or a panel type of discussion, where it's like we had this really compelling training internally and we identified the opportunity to take out some of the company sensitive information that exists there and just put it out for prospects to engage with as well. Really big on that I'm, uh, I'm fucking it it out for prospects to engage with as well. Really big on that I'm, uh, I'm fucking it.

What. What about you? Uh, I, I gotta go with interactive content. I fucking love interactive content. Um, I tried to do it at every company. I I ended up working for um, interactive content.

So this is anything from like calculators on the website to you know, quizzes, uh, surveys, just any type of thing that gets users to actually interact with it beyond just reading or reading blog posts or watching a video or something. The reason I love it is not every company has the resources or the know-how to actually build a lot of these types of tools, so I'm fortunate that I was able to learn how to code five, 10 years ago or whatnot. You know, I actually enjoy doing it. Like, I think it's a good reprieve from some of the other work that I'm doing. To, you know, take three to five hours or so to, you know, just put together a tool.

I think it's fun to kind of build these things and I always see, you know, pretty good engagement with them as well. Like, once I put them on like a pricing page or on the competitive comparison page or whatnot, I see people actually using them. Like we use like event tracking and whatnot to see how people engage with them and, more often than not, like people who you know, depending on what the goal is, whether it's like a free trial signup or a freemium signup or a demo request or whatnot typically the people that engage with these types of tools tend to convert at a much, much, much higher rate than people who would just be statically, you know, just browsing a static website, for example. So, yeah, fucking love interactive content. It's a great way to kind of provide value to the user upfront, before you try to extract value.

That's so interesting. What do you attribute that to? Like the better conversion rate? Is it just like classic medium is the message and it wins by virtue of the fact that it is interactive, or is it being strategic with making the right type of content interactive? I think you mentioned demo, for example, just what page you're on in general.

So we just built out a competitive comparison calculator. For example, we went against this competitor so much in one-to-one deals and we went a lot on pricing. But we also just went on feature set. That's important to our customers. So putting that front and center, asking them for the inputs like what are you paying for your current provider, how many users you have, you know, whatever, whatever inputs we need to calculate the price, and then we show them. You know how much they could save annually, how much they could save monthly by switching to us.

You know what the feature breakdown is, what the comparison is and whatnot. And I think that just being it's you know, just being able to personalize it to them and what's important to them is a lot of what just helps to improve the conversion rate. It's one thing to show that we cost $99 a month and our competitors $199 a month. It's something else to show, try to customize it as much to their actual needs and usage and then show how much they could save that and then extrapolate that up by like a year or two years, whatever the, whatever the contract might be that's really cool.

Makes a ton of sense too yeah, cool.

So we're gonna go to mary next. Um for mary. For me, like I'm, it's got to be seo. Like I got my start in seo, like my start in marketing, I should say um by by doing seo. And it's the kind of thing where it's. You know, everyone always says that SEO is dead or it's going out of style or it's becoming less effective. I'm the biggest fan of SEO. Like it's such a non intrusive form of marketing, like you're actually providing value to the user for things that they actually care about and they're actively searching for. And, best of all, it's free traffic. You know, obviously it takes time and money to. You know, get to a place where you're getting, you know, good organic results but by far, like in every company I've worked at, it's the highest ROI channel. You know it's a great way to kind of build trust with your audience. And, you know, get in front of people when they're actively looking for solutions.

It's a really good answer. I don't mean to make this awkward, but I too would like to marry that tactic. That's exactly where my head went to as well, for the reason that we were talking about earlier. Right, it takes time to build up and have the level of traction that you want to in terms of return. Right, Building rank, building authority for different things, establishing subject matter expertise on it. You're building authority for different things, establishing subject matter expertise on it.

But, like I just, even with your chat GPTs and your other type of AIs that make you know, searching a different type of, a different type of experience, you still have to solve the same thing. Right, it's still relying on, like the quality of content that comes from your domain, and I just I don't ever think that it's a bad idea to provide people with like genuinely helpful information that also happens to strengthen the domain that you're publishing it on. And again, you go back to like that cost saving advantage as well. Like I'll get the competitive instance that you mentioned earlier. Like it really gets my goat having to spend money just to solve for an aesthetic of bidding against competitor queries. Right, like we had a well-optimized page that was just like the one that you were describing. Here's us, here's them, and that pops up organically. That'd be fucking beautiful and I hope that. I hope to have the ability to do something like that someday soon at my current work.

Awesome. So, that being said, it sounds like we're going to have an argument over who gets to marry SEO, but we'll settle that at another time. All right, so let's move on to to kill. I'll let you go first. Which marketing tactics strategy campaign do you just want to fucking murder?

This is hard because there are it's, it's it's a competitive field. I think it's what I would say for this, for this particular, this particular topic. If I had to kill one tactic right now, I think I would kill. I think I'm trying to think of how to say this the right way. Like opaque pricing pages. Just fucking tell people what you cost. Don't hide behind this bullet.

And like listen, I get that it can be difficult to put together like a custom quote and there's discounting levers that can be put forward and the use case may impact and you may need certain components of a platform and not others, and that all does like come into consideration when it comes to putting an actual proposal together. But like at least be forthcoming with like the minimum amount that someone might pay for your offering. I despise going to anything really, whether it's for a marketing movement or whether it's like in my personal life. I'm going to pay just to tell me how much you fucking cost so I can decide whether or not it's worth my time to even have a conversation with someone that might ultimately end up selling me the thing I would kill opaque pricing pages immediately.

What would you kill? Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with that. I mean I think that transparency is more important than you know. Transparency and authenticity, those are the, as far as I'm concerned, the name of the game, with marketing. And in 2024, much to sales team's chagrins, unfortunately, that's just what buyers expect now.

And going back to the interactive content, that's why I like showing that type of stuff is you can get a little bit more granular by on a pricing page, asking the customer based on how your pricing is, if it's by user, if it's by, you know, whatever. If it's a flat fee, like just asking them what's important to them, what features are important to them, and then generating output. You know it could be a customized quote or whatever. And then you know if your company's like I've worked for a previous company, I believe that you worked for a similar company that was heavily relying on discounting. Yep, I know it's a great sales tactic, but I mean don't, don't bank on discounting just for the sake of discounting, like have.

If you overly discount, then you're also like devaluing the product, Like the product should kind of stand on its own. If it's a good product that you believe in, you wouldn't necessarily need to discount, but I know how it can be like a sales lever and you know I get that. But yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, people just expect transparency and they just want to know that they're paying a fair price for things. Like don't basically like don't be a car dealership, be a? Uh what's what's the opposite of like a car dealership? Uh, be be a grocery store. You know, be a grocery store, people, not a Shaw's. Be like a Market Basket or something.

Nice. Our Boston audience is nodding vigorously right now. I have a couple of thoughts on that, man, because you really brought up some good points. Thing number one is when it comes to the ability to discount and what have you, if you're putting your pricing out there and someone's like, oh, out of budget or I can't afford it right now, whatever the case may be fine, like if I'm a rep, why would I want to waste my time talking to someone qualifying I get the, I get the value of like building out your book of business, right, but in the immediate near term, I would rather talk to someone that's like actually going to potentially close, right, and someone that literally cannot right now. And maybe, if you've done this, where marketing comes in right, if you've done a good enough job selling the value prop of your organization, of your product on your site, then they might come back in the future when they do actually have budget and it's a worthwhile conversation for your sales team to have. That's thing number one.

Thing number two is I got to give a shout out to a piece of software that I used in a previous gig called Nevatic. Nevatic is, to my knowledge, at the forefront of an interactive demo type of experience. They make it really easy to do. They make it easy to put different pop-up CTAs throughout the course of someone walking through, and it makes a huge difference because, if you think about, there's good information that's circulating around LinkedIn and elsewhere on this, but, like the average journey now is, someone goes to the homepage right Via I don't know. However, they find it right, then they navigate to a pricing page.

How much does this thing cost me? Can I afford it? Cool. If no, they bounce fine. If yes, then the next thing they want to see is well, how does this thing actually work? Can I envision myself as the end user, the day-to-day user, or as someone that needs to pitch the value of this to someone that would be the end user? Can I see myself actually using this thing? And that is the value of showing the thing and not gating that behind multiple different discovery calls and that type of stuff. It's just like the time and guess what, sorry. Final thing on this is that that's also going to have an impact on deal velocity. When that much qualification and upfront work is done pre-demo request form or pre-sales conversation form being submitted you're that much closer to having that deal close. You're that much closer to attaining your quota and rent.

And you're going to have a happier customer Just at the end of the day.

Like, don't, don't waste people's time. People are busy. They don't have time for like three discovery calls before they even get a quote that you know that might be wasting your time, might be wasting theirs. Just, uh, don't waste people's time. Um, I'll quickly uh say mine. Um, I'm actually kind of torn between what I want to kill, because there's two that in particular I definitely want to kill. But the one that I would kill first would probably be direct mail. Um, don't, don't send me stuff for me to throw it away for you, just throw it away yourself. Like I don't, don't send me stuff for me to throw it away for you, just throw it away yourself. Like, I don't think I've ever been influenced by a direct mailer in my entire life and I'm not about to start now.

Um, on a separate but somewhat related note is a door to door. So I live out in the burbs of Boston. Um, the number of times that I've I've lived here where I've had a door toto-door person trying to sell me lawn care or solar, you know how many solar salesmen have come by my house in the past year? I want to say at least four to five have tried to sell me solar. You want to know what's even worse? I fucking have solar already. If you take five seconds to look on Google Maps, you can see the solar panels right on the back of my house. Yes, I'm fully solar, don't need solar. I can only have so much solar. I don't need any more solar. So don't come to my door and make my dog start barking and freaking out. I already got solar. I'm doing my part for the environment. What are you doing by driving around wasting gas, trying to get people to buy solar and rant on that one?

thoughts beautiful. Uh, he meant recycle when he said throw away, because, like he said he does, he does have solar power. And yeah, dude, like, do you have their solar panels, though do you have theirs? Maybe that that's what they're thinking. Maybe that's what they're thinking, and to that I hope you would respond no, of course not, I don't want your shit.

You know what? I don't have your solar panels, but I'm gonna tear down the tesla solar panels that I do have and I'm gonna put up yours do you ever think about messing with them and, like your dog is, wouldn't hurt a fly, but it's thinking about like attack. Let's take them honestly like I kind of want to put up the where dog sign up on my front door and then they they get inside and like they see the dog barking, it's like the friendliest looking golden retriever ever amazing, amazing.

Well, hey, speaking of chasing people off, we are being chased off, as per usual, by the end of our free zoom. Thanks for coming back, guys. We got a lot more stuff to get off our chest next week. Until then, good luck while finding all those leads. We appreciate you, take care.

Thanks, y'all, thank you.