Speaker 1: 0:00

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Speaker 2: 0:58

Hey, welcome back to Marketing Qualified. I'm Mike Griffin.

Speaker 1: 1:01

And I'm Chris Newman, and we actually have a very special guest to introduce to everyone today our inaugural guest at the Marketing Qualified podcast. He's the head of marketing, with over a decade of marketing experience, mostly in the SaaS space, and the saltiest son of a bitch I know. Dan Cohen, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 3: 1:16

Thanks for having me. I'm hopeful that I will not ruin it for future guests here. You guys will want to have another guest on after this.

Speaker 1: 1:21

Yeah, absolutely, year and you guys will want to have another guest on after this.

Speaker 2: 1:23

Yeah, I was gonna ask you who this gentleman is on the line with us.

Speaker 1: 1:26

Wasn't quite sure what the deal with this is, and we've been hacked yeah, we forgot to password protect this zoom and uh, this guy just randomly joined to uh to sit in on the podcast.

Speaker 3: 1:36

Uh, you guys should be so lucky that that would happen to you.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Yeah, he's also probably one of our only listeners right now as well One of the five downloads that we've had so far, but yeah, so Dan wanted to kind of get into this. You mentioned to me relatively recently that you were interviewing for new roles and whatnot, and one of the head of marketing roles that you interviewed with you were talking to the CEO of this tech company and famously told him that marketing is bullshit. Did you want to talk a little bit more about that? It sounds like he wanted to actually hire you even after saying that.

Speaker 3: 2:11

Yeah, I did. I mean this company had reached out to me. I wasn't that interested. I figured I would ever just talk to this guy. I'll placate him.

Speaker 3: 2:17

And you know I was going through the motions. He was saying that like they've hired marketers in their past and they haven't had success. So I just looked them in the eye and said marketing is bullshit. And like his eyes lit up like you know he. You know he was looking at like an Outback Steakhouse, like Bloomin' Onion or something. He really lit up after that and we kind of connected after that and he really liked me and he wanted to hire me and I basically told him no, they had no clue what they were doing from a marketing standpoint. And uh, a lot of people just don't understand marketing. I mean, I kind of understand it, I guess, and uh, I I knew enough to understand that his product wasn't marketable so I had no interest in joining this company I just envision his reaction being like you know, when you think you're, you think you're the shit because you found this underground, lesser known artist yet and they're absolutely amazing.

Speaker 2: 3:03

And then you find that one other fan, that they connect, like yes, I've been saying this for forever, they are fucking dope. And that's what I envision his reaction. Yeah, I mean, because it is.

Speaker 3: 3:11

I mean it is absolute fucking bullshit. Like we can get into this a little bit later. But like if your product sucks, you can't market it.

Speaker 3: 3:17

Like you can't put lipstick on a pig and I think there's a lot of lipstick on pigs going on right now and, uh, unless you ever to invest in your product and people actually want your product, you can't create demand for it. And I think a lot of people have not realized that yet. And we're going through a process right now where companies have been overvalued, they've been given too much money and they're like throwing, like, oh, marketing and sales can do it, but if the product doesn't match what the customers want and customers don't actually want it and you can't really do anything with it.

Speaker 1: 3:48

Yeah, and we're going to get into that whole product market. Fit how important it is a little bit later, but figured, we'd you know. Speaking of putting lipstick on pigs, we're going to start off with one of our opening questions. So opening question I have for both of you, gentlemen if animals could talk, which species do you think would be the most annoying? And we were chatting a little bit earlier about this with Dan. Dan said that whatever species I am would be the most annoying. But, Dan, I'll let you go first with hopefully a better answer than that.

Speaker 3: 4:20

Yeah, I was going to say Chris Newton, Fuck, you are Mammal beluga whale. I don't really know what you are, but if we actually have to guess like the actual animal, I would probably say like an ostrich. I'll say that I was mildly almost assaulted by an ostrich when I was a kid at Animal Country Safari when I was in a rental car in Florida with my parents and in a van the ostrich came like pecking its ugly ass head into our van and I was like petrified for life. They're not only ugly but they're awkwardly shaped and they just look like a bunch of assholes. So if they could talk, I would just figure that they're probably like 90% of the marketers in the SaaS space.

Speaker 1: 4:59

It's always good to tie everything back to marketing. You know this is a marketing qualified podcast but, yeah, yeah, I feel like we often get on non-marketing tangents, but you know it is good to, you know, kind of bring it all back together. So, yeah, thanks for dan trying to keep it on brand for you guys for a second, I thought you were talking about me, but, um, yeah, I've never, uh, seen you in florida actually. No, that's not a lie, that we did we yeah, we went to florida yeah so maybe you were talking about me.

Speaker 1: 5:23

Fuck you dan. Oh yeah, did you guys watch the roast of tom brady kevin hart? Fuck you tom, fuck you dan. It's uh great. If either of you guys haven't watched at all or you know any of the three listeners haven't watched it.

Speaker 3: 5:38

Highly recommend it's hilarious mike you down to, uh, to just turn this into a roast of Chris Newton.

Speaker 2: 5:43

Instead I would like to say I'm unprepared for that, but that would be a lie. I'm so down.

Speaker 1: 5:52

All right. Well, anyways, before we get into the roast of Chris Newton, Mike, what do you think was the most annoying animal?

Speaker 2: 6:00

With the disclosure that this may just be me projecting my annoyance that I get from this animal onto the situation pandas. I think that pandas are one of the most overrated fucking animals out there. I think they get way too much love. I think that everything that they do is like, oh, it's automatically adorable and cute. And look at all this.

Speaker 2: 6:19

It's so fucking difficult to keep this thing alive, like in habitation, right? And you see all these documentaries about how like difficult they have, whatever it's like, how they exist in the wild, just pissing me off. And I just imagine that they're so high maintenance that if they could talk, everything would just be like them needing a hand, they need a favor with something, and it just it reminds me of like a whiny salesperson, right, like, oh, this person isn't totally qualified. This didn't check the box or what do you mean? You didn't ask for their fucking annual revenue and social security number and all that shit in the form like they. Just it just gets my goat. And that that's all I want to say about pandas, for risk of getting just absolutely butchered.

Speaker 1: 6:52

So my, my mind went straight to sales as well. Um, I mean, it's, either I've had sales reps say that I'm sending them too many leads, and then other reps, you know, obviously the classic thing is you're not sending them enough, or they're not qualified, or you know they're not completely ready to buy by the time they get there and I'm like, well, you know, there is a little bit that you need to do as well on the sales side. Dan, I'm sure that you have plenty to weigh in on the sales side as well.

Speaker 3: 7:15

Yeah, I mean, do we want to like completely derail this conversation Because we can just blow it up right here if you want me to start talking about sales.

Speaker 1: 7:22

We should. I mean, I wouldn't be opposed to a spin-off podcast called Sales Qualified.

Speaker 3: 7:29

Yeah, I mean my hot take in two seconds or less is that? Well, it'll be one in two seconds. But yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot of great salespeople but today people buying software don't want to talk to sales and sales just get in the way and they create a lot of speed bumps and a lot of salespeople. Actually, every salesperson I met nowadays does not want to actually prospect and in order to generate pipeline, you need to be able to prospect and people think sales is just getting on a phone and talking to somebody. But to me, the best salespeople can prospect, find their customers and close them. But there's everyone now is just like a consultant. They get on a call and they try to sell a product that's already sold. That's not sales. To me, it's full funnel and people don't want to roll up their sleeves and do that.

Speaker 2: 8:12

It's so obvious when someone does actually have the acumen needed to be an effective salesperson to do that prospecting, there's a time and a place for that consultative sale, right? And especially if marketing has to your point earlier, down like a decent product to market and can make that compelling use case, then of course you're going to get a little bit more love from even the shittier salespeople, right? But boy oh boy is it obvious when someone just doesn't have it and I think that's where a lot of the tension can arise between marketing and sales when it's like marketing could be a well-oiled machine playing the cards that were dealt, but then you pass that baton to someone who just isn't ready, and that's the unfortunate experience that the organization and, frankly, the end user goes through as well.

Speaker 3: 8:57

Yeah, no, it's interesting because Chris knows this, but Mike, you probably don't. In my previous company, when I'm kind of just winding down as a startup that didn't have success, I took over sales in addition to marketing, and when I started doing the demos, mind you, I'd never professionally been in sales, like I just went in. It's just being super direct with the people and I was like listen, I don't want to sell you shit. Like I'm not here to sell you stuff, like I want to understand and see if it's a fit and I don't want to carry this on. If it's a fit, I'll tell you. If not, and like immediately the people were like oh my God, this is great and I actually closed some deals because of the directness, instead of just like beating around the bush and stuff like that. Like people want honesty and they don't. They just want transparency and that just doesn't exist today 110%.

Speaker 2: 9:36

Chris mentioned something similar on I don't know people's time right. Be honest, be direct. I think we're talking about it in the capacity of like why you should have a clear pricing page readily available on the website that people just want to cut to the chase. And if you're being direct with them both on the marketing and sales front, then that's going to ultimately solve for what every party is trying to accomplish.

Speaker 1: 9:59

Yeah, and it's actually. We're actually in the sales process for a couple pieces of software at my current company right now. And also, like the thing that frustrates me more than anything with salespeople like when I'm buying, something is being fit into a cookie cutter one size fits all sales process like oh, you have to go through discovery, you have to go through demo, you have to go through qualification like you have to go through all these different stages. As a prospect I've used this tool in multiple companies in the past I don't want to fucking go through this whole process and if anything, my coworker and I are actually joking that the sales team is actually kind of blocking the deal. We're almost considering looking at competitors just because we don't want to fucking deal with the sales rep and their bullshit anymore.

Speaker 1: 10:46

It's it's just, you know, super frustrating as a prospect, especially like when they don't listen. Like I've told them multiple times what we need. We need an roi analysis. We need some kind of proof to like share with our vp of marketing as to what we can expect, and you know, we're willing to pay the cost, but but she just does not listen to what we need. We've had to ask multiple times for an ROI analysis. She literally even reached out to me through email asking me how to do her job.

Speaker 1: 11:17

And it's what do you mean? She's like what do you need from? Like, what do you need from me? Like, what's our next steps? I'm like you tell me, like I'm trying to buy this fucking software. And she's like that's amazing.

Speaker 1: 11:30

Yeah, it's, it's absurd. It's the most absurd sales process and I think that we're getting closer to a deal. Um, I was actually joking around with dan earlier that in a separate deal that I'm working on right now, something that we're trying to buy, like I kind of like derped my way into a negotiation, like I actually like negotiated a price decrease, despite myself, like and basically like I reached out to the sales rep. I'm like he's he's pitching us like this, this hidden fee, or something that he didn't disclose previously, and I just asked him a question about what it was, and then he replied telling me something. And then I either missed that email or I didn't reply, and then, a day later, he replied being like we took the fee off for you now chris is going to try this in every walk of his life so he can get a chicken sandwich for 50 cents cheaper than us.

Speaker 3: 12:16

Yeah, yeah, get the bill and pretend not to pay and just wait there and just waiting for those 50 cents off, because we know Chris loves his cheapness.

Speaker 1: 12:26

I mean, 50 cents is 50 cents, Dan If you save 50, cents a day then that's what Like 15 bucks a month, 350 a week. Yeah, we're rolling there.

Speaker 2: 12:35

You can almost get two-thirds of a Starbucks rank at that point Almost.

Speaker 1: 12:40

Almost get a new antenna because you're too cheap to buy a regular fucking tv uh, speaking of which, I did actually uh purchase youtube tv so I could watch the celtics dance. So, once the champion, once they win the championship, I'm going to cancel it.

Speaker 2: 12:52

But yeah, smart investment based on at time of recording game two of the cab series was last night. Boy, do I feel like a fucking asshole for opening my beer earlier than I have at any other point in the game, and I take full responsibility for them just getting mocked at home.

Speaker 3: 13:09

Yeah, we don't need, we don't need us. That will derail the conversation if we go there, but yeah, awesome.

Speaker 1: 13:14

Uh, should we move into the, the next segment also? Uh, mike, I think that we should probably talk about how this is the first named episode. Do you want to kind of talk about why we started doing this?

Speaker 2: 13:25

Yeah, to talk about that. We have to just acknowledge that neither Chris nor I can recall why we started naming them in Spanish. Just episode numero uno just sort of came about being tossed around. It went to DOS, it went to Trace, but the fact of the matter is that this is about as high as either of us can actually count in Spanish, despite the countless hours of Duolingo. I'm trying to get done here. I don't know about you, chris, but this is it. So we're going to be switching to a different type of format now. This should be the first one that you see in your feeds eventually that has an actual name to it, that isn't just like a number and a feeble attempt at some espanol anything I'm leaving out there no, I, I think that's pretty much it and uh, dan, if you can count higher than five, now might be a good time to uh continue the nomenclature of uh the previous episodes or if you have other languages.

Speaker 1: 14:15

I can't count higher than five, so yeah, and you can't even count higher than five in english, right, yeah, that's what I just said.

Speaker 3: 14:22

Yeah, if you can hear me turn up. Yeah, yeah, I didn't realize you're really on today, chris I, I don't know what it is.

Speaker 1: 14:27

I think that you know. Maybe the celtics game threw me off last night. I feel like I feel like the celtics in game two, honestly, like I'm not on my a game today, wow timely reference timely timely reference. But uh, yeah, let's. Uh, let's move on to the, the next one. Mike, I understand that you have a, a game for us to play. Uh, neither dan or I know what's coming, so we like to kind of keep things spontaneous. But uh, mike, what you got for us yes.

Speaker 2: 14:54

So when we were talking about bringing aboard our first guest to the marketing qualified podcast, chris first of all immediately was like salty dan. And I was like what the fuck is a salty dan? I had to learn more about who this gentleman is that would be hopping on with us. But the more I learned, the more I was enthused. And one thing that came up and I forget how exactly it did, but chris is like, yeah, he really feels strongly about just fucking acronyms that are used in a professional or like a marketing capacity. Like okay, so this guy who I'm going to meet for the first time really hates acronyms. Why don't I press his buttons a little bit and see if we can talk acronyms for some time?

Speaker 2: 15:30

So, chris, I'm going to let you in on the fun here. I have about 10 of these things and the game here is acronyms for or from a shitty marketer. So I'm going to give you guys, each individually, an acronym that you've probably heard used a lot in a professional capacity. I want you to put on just your shitty marketing manager, both in terms of, like marketing, campaign management as well as marketing people management, and try to determine is the original value of the acronym what I'm envisioning here, or is it something different? Chris, I'm going to have you go first got it.

Speaker 1: 16:04

Okay, it shouldn't be hard for me to put on my shitty marketing helmet.

Speaker 2: 16:07

Well, the reason it's so funny, the reason I'm having you go first, because this one I'm pulling directly from our hubspot days together g s d. What does g s d stand for? Get shit done Ordinarily, but you got to think in terms of a shitty marketing manager. Want to take a second swipe at that? Fuck Shitty. I'll give this one to you and then this will help you, dan, prepare for your own Given shitty direction. If you're a marketing manager, you're often given shitty direction by the CEO, by the product team, by the sales folks. But what do you actually need with this? The GSD? Given shitty direction, an acronym for a shitty marketing manager. Dan, are you ready for yours? I hope so. Kpi.

Speaker 3: 17:03

Oh, I know what I mean.

Speaker 1: 17:04

Indicator.

Speaker 2: 17:05

Or whatever.

Speaker 3: 17:09

Indicator. Sorry, kill performance instantly.

Speaker 2: 17:15

I like that more than what I have. That's a really good one For a shitty market manager. I had keep punting initiative. No, we can't launch right now, we keep getting delayed, it's still in QA. That's a really good one for a shitty market manager. I had keep punting initiative. No, we can't launch right now, we keep getting delayed. Yeah, it's still in review, it's still in QA, kind of thing. Keep punting initiative. I like yours better. I like yours better. All right. Previous Klaviyo boys on the line. This one I'll give to both of you.

Speaker 2: 17:39

CTR Chris tanked reporting can't track results yeah, you guys are better at this than I am. I like both of those, but I had to complicate the rationale like well, you figure, we move this budget around here. We fucking put this stuff. You guys are, you guys are good, you guys are very good. This one is not specific to marketing, but it it's one that all marketing and just general professionals should have in our repertoire here. E-o-d, of course, ordinarily it would stand for end of day. What do you think a shitty marketing manager would have for that acronym? I'm going to bail you guys out on this one. I can see the wheels turning here. Evidence of disillusion. This fucking guy has the craziest idea for the ads. They're never going to work. He's got super EOD Like this ain't going to pan out whatsoever.

Speaker 3: 18:33

Chris and I can go on a rant about what we've seen this week with that, but we won't.

Speaker 2: 18:37

Okay, TBA Actually genuinely curious. Have you come across this actual acronym in your day-to-day? I was introduced to it somewhat recently. No, I don't think so no, yeah, okay, that makes me feel a little better. Tba to be announced shitty marketing manager. Uh, you know I'm just kidding, since none of us knew the actual one. Uh, tbi had this bitch again. You know that one person that hits your inbox and he's just like Jesus Christ what now For Chris?

Speaker 3: 19:10

it's not one person, it's anybody, any human that hits Chris's inbox. He's just like oh my God, oh my God, what do they want from me?

Speaker 1: 19:16

So yeah, that is amazing. That's a good one. I'm going to start using TBA Mike Perfect Every time Dan fucking slacks me. The TBA.

Speaker 2: 19:28

TBA. All right, I'm just going to have you rank the last couple here so we can get to the next segment. I have CRM cringe-ready material. I have SEO seriously egregious organization sfs. Solve for stupid. I used to say this to my direct reports all the time like make this as fucking simple as possible, solve for stupid. Uh, and then I have two others. Wwyr, why would you reply all reply all, assuming as being the hyphenated one here, and then finally gafb, give me a fucking break. You guys have one in that batch that you think you'll be using more regularly than others now it's all for stupid.

Speaker 3: 20:17

Yeah, I mean, but you can't do that because everyone's fucking stupid, including me. So like we're fucked there, chris, you gotta go to now.

Speaker 1: 20:23

I I like the seo one just because I feel like that's every organization these days.

Speaker 2: 20:29

You're not wrong. Yeah, it's a little bit hard to keep morale up at times, isn't it well done?

Speaker 3: 20:34

guys well done.

Speaker 2: 20:35

Well, here's the thing there are no winners there. I think actually, we're all a bit dumber from having gone through that, so why don't we go ahead and transition to the next bit here? What do we got here?

Speaker 1: 20:46

Should we go into fake job titles next?

Speaker 2: 20:50

Just did fake acronyms. Might as well do job titles now.

Speaker 1: 20:53

Yeah, so yeah, let's. Let's just kind of chat through like some of the more ridiculous job titles I mean most job titles, if not every job title is bullshit anyways. They don't mean anything for the most part. But I just came across this job title the other day that my wife was talking about and we were just kind of like you know, salting about it, like what the fuck does this even mean? The job title is Decision Scientist.

Speaker 2: 21:24

Decision. Scientist does this even mean?

Speaker 1: 21:25

uh, the job title is decision scientist, decision scientist. So I guess what? What would you guys think that would mean?

Speaker 3: 21:31

they look at ab test results and they determine which one is better, uh like scientifically yeah, I, I guess I, yeah, that could be.

Speaker 1: 21:39

That could be a good one for that.

Speaker 2: 21:41

Yeah, that's a good bit, I think, because I'm in the middle of just a god-awful contracting-level conversation right now. It's like decision scientists, right? It would be like does this make the most sense to move forward with this particular vendor? Should we assess otherwise? You kind of come to a data-backed reason for making the call that you did Like a procurement professional, basically.

Speaker 1: 21:59

Yeah, let's kind of break this down. So I just Googled the definition of what a scientist is. It's a person who is studying or has expert knowledge of one of the natural or physical sciences. So that's the definition I'm actually trying to find, see if there's a better one here. But basically it's making decisions based on based on facts, like shouldn't everyone be doing that anyways? Like is there any?

Speaker 1: 22:32

I I guess in most organizations like the, the sc, like what was the acronym again, uh, seriously egregious organization, yeah and like I feel, like most organizations, like they'll gather all the data and then just make a fucking decision not based on the data anyways. So a decision scientist is somebody who should be making decisions based on facts. Like the fact that a fucking company even needs that kind of a job title just blows my mind. Like decisions should be made on facts anyways.

Speaker 2: 23:03

It should be and the. The stupid face here for me, for the, the audio format folks, was just, if you're not just based on facts, right, like I we lamented about this in the previous episode about just, uh, people really being resistant to suggestions or testing something for the first time, like I recently went through, went through this god awful couple months long process of trying to convince the powers that be that we should not gate what is essentially a two and a half minute long commercial for one of the organization's products. That was a gut feeling based on what I knew to be true about how I prefer to consume content, right, but there was a lot of pushback on that motion like well, we need to solve for attribution. We need to make sure that we gate this video. We can give it a little preview, a 30 second teaser on our LinkedIn ads, or we can do, you know, a thumbnail on the on the landing page and when you click the play button we'll pop up a form. We'll be able to capture intent that way and it just it was so wonderfully validating.

Speaker 2: 24:11

After these several months had elapsed, we took down the gate. We saw this way, better performance in terms of playthrough rate and just people then going on, having consumed the whole video, to do an actual high intent conversion, like request a demo or maybe look at a case study page or something like that. But the decision scientist part of that it's like the powers that be were certainly not decision scientists and it drove me nuts until quite recently, as a matter of fact, that's what came to mind for me.

Speaker 1: 24:41

Dan, you got any crazy job titles that you can think of.

Speaker 3: 24:46

I mean, I had a crazy job title, as you know, klaviyo. I was there for like two and a half years and for a year and a half of it my job was to explain what the fuck I do. It was a segment marketing manager. No one knew what the hell that meant. I thought I knew what it meant, and then I did know what it meant and I didn't know what it meant, and then I didn't know what it meant and I didn't know what it meant, and, yeah, I don't know. It was fun. I remember doing two, three presentations that Chris was a part of, but what my job was was kind of just making it up on the fly and yeah, what do you guys think that?

Speaker 2: 25:15

means. Again, I'll talk about this fucking contract right now. A segment immediately to me triggers Sixth Sense. Like Sixth Sense, like Sixth Sense. You are marketing to a particular segment you have created in Sixth Sense, and that is solely what you are responsible for. What do you think, chris? Do you know? Like you were there, I guess.

Speaker 1: 25:36

I do think I know what it means. I don't really know if anyone knows what Dan did for those two years, but it's my understanding that he was meant to market to entrepreneurs. He was the entrepreneur segment manager. They figured that, oh, dan's an entrepreneur, he has a sock business, let's put him in charge of marketing to other people with sock businesses.

Speaker 3: 25:57

But it was more than just marketing, because I was doing some product stuff, some sales stuff. I was basically what I called in one of my previous jobs Team TP wiping people's ass with toilet paper. Whatever they't want to do, I would clean up their shit.

Speaker 2: 26:10

It's amazing, yeah, it's amazing, but you're like the wolf from pulp fiction, right, you call it dan, when you need the shit cleaned up real quick yeah.

Speaker 3: 26:18

Yeah, it was like clean up aisle three, bring in dan, you can do it. Yeah, no that was my job nice.

Speaker 1: 26:24

Uh, you also touched on something, dan uh, where you know where you you would like have presentations like, basically explain what you did. Uh, gave me some pretty bad flashbacks of the the time where, basically, we had to defend the seo work that we were doing and the sales team was like we need more seo leads. And you know, we don't know what this is all about. So we put together a whole training for the sales team. Not a single sales rep showed up and I think it was just like you, our other coworker, mike, and like our boss, who showed up for this meeting to like basically defend what we're doing for like SEO and paid search and stuff. Do you remember that?

Speaker 3: 26:58

To their defense. Chris, it was marketed internally that you were presenting to people, so it was like we don't want to go see Chris. Like you know, I I not to tell you this right now I did the presentation a week later and we had a hundred sales reps there. Uh so yeah, yeah, packed standing room only.

Speaker 1: 27:14

All right, all right. Well, I'm just going to see myself out, then I'll see you guys later.

Speaker 2: 27:19

So good, so good. Yeah, I mean, first of all I was actually impressed that someone would ask. Like you know, first of all I was actually impressed that someone would ask what we need or demand more SEO leads. That indicates some level of understanding about how that is and what it works.

Speaker 1: 27:37

That to me was impressive. All right, well, dan's not coming back to guest host ever again.

Speaker 3: 27:42

This episode is never going to air. No, because we only have eight minutes left. So they just got to deal with me for eight minutes and never see me again. So there you go.

Speaker 2: 27:48

By the way, just to empathize with you for a minute, Dan, I had a boss that once said to me he recommended that I put together a type of internal slide deck. That was a roadshow that introduced myself, my team because this is maybe not a direct quote, but as close to verbatim as I can recall is because no one besides myself and my boss knows what the hell you do. And it was delivered like that and I'm thinking to myself I can totally do that, but isn't that kind of a you fucking problem too Like?

Speaker 3: 28:27

you fucking hired me, you dumbass Like, yeah, like you're the one, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's. It's like it's like these executives who make more money after they fire everybody because their stock price goes up. It's like you're the, you're the decision makers who approved this. Now you're ruining everyone's lives, but hey, the stock is up, so you're rich.

Speaker 1: 28:45

Terrific, yeah, all right, do we want to switch into the discussion about product market fit? I know that Dan feels pretty salty about companies these days and how much product market fit, or lack thereof, they have.

Speaker 3: 29:06

Yeah, I mean I can bat lead off here. I mean I think that there's like there's, you know, as much as we bashed on salespeople earlier, like I don't want to just bash on all salespeople, there are like one or two good ones out there, but you know, I think from a sales and marketing perspective, you can only sell and market a product that is good, and what's happening in today's world is there's increased pressure on marketing and sales to sell a product that either sucks for one or B is. Nobody wants it, there's no need for it. And so I've seen this in a lot of different scenarios and kind of seeing it right now.

Speaker 3: 29:40

I've seen it in the past where founders have raised a significant amount of capital I don't know how, probably during the height of the COVID boom around ideas that nobody wants, and so they have a crazy valuation, and now they're putting a tremendous amount of pressure on marketing and sales to deliver, and the whole sales narrative has shifted in the sense of like outbound doesn't work anymore, traditional ads don't work anymore. It know, traditional ads don't work anymore. It's all about customers talking about your product, and if you don't have customers talking about your product, you can't generate demand for it, and in order to get customers to talk about your product, your product has to be good and solve a need for them, and so you can't market or sell a product that doesn't have that stuff right now, and so it's just like causing so much thrash throughout. You know the go to market world and that's my rant, so you guys can feel free to add on to it or say that I'm crazy, which you already know that. But yeah, that's an end rant here.

Speaker 1: 30:35

You mean, you can't just manufacture demand out of nowhere, you can't just like pull it out of the ether.

Speaker 3: 30:43

I mean we can do like a bundle deal like hey, buy this, you get two free pairs of neon bandits in like a date at olive garden with chris, but I don't know if people would want the latter but your family when you go there, right, yeah, yeah, there's breadsticks.

Speaker 2: 30:58

I mean, that's I. I had a couple of reactions as you were describing that, dan. The first is like all of that, by the way, the immense pressure on marketing to just create demand out of nowhere often comes hand in hand with a substantially reduced budget from that which you've had in years past. But my personal experience for the last several years here and then the other thing is I just remember at one point at a at a organization I told my then boss was like listen, the product itself is fucking boring. What you can do with the product is kind of interesting, but there's only so much that we can do in terms of marketing that if we don't have people, customers that are willing to actually speak to it and if they're not willing to speak to the power of what they're able to create, then doesn't that kind of indicate a low quality product? And it's just this circular kind of conversation Really tough.

Speaker 3: 31:49

It's like, yeah, it's like a two-step process and I saw this a lot within the e-commerce ecosystem in the past couple of years. It's like you might be able to get the initial part of the lead, so to speak, like if you're doing Google ads or a sponsorship of like people, like oh, I'm interested, but the second part to get them on the phone and potentially close is you need the customer talking about you. So, like you need to get to the lead. You know cost money to get people to the, to the site, to to maybe sign up for a lead and a demo or whatever, and to get them to the finish line you need the customer to give a testimonial and if you don't have that second step, it doesn't make sense to waste money on the first Totally agree.

Speaker 1: 32:30

Totally agree. I think that's a good segue into kind of just the disconnect between how companies talk about themselves versus how customers talk about the company. I actually saw something interesting on LinkedIn earlier this week, which doesn't happen often. If anyone knows me, they know how much I fucking hate LinkedIn and how much stupid bullshit is on there and bad advice and all that other stuff. But so one of the things that I saw this week was it's like kind of like a graphic of how SaaS executives think customers talk about their company and how customers actually talk about their company.

Speaker 1: 33:03

So one of the examples here is Gong. They say our customers use Gong for quote revenue intelligence. And same thing with like the job titles, like the fake job titles decision scientists what the fuck does that even mean Revenue intelligence? It means nothing. It means absolutely nothing. And then if you look at how customers actually talk about Gong, they say we useong to record and analyze our sales calls. Like that's what gong is for, like everyone who knows gong. Like that's what it does is it records sales calls and helps you, you know, figure out what's working and what's not this is exactly what dan was saying earlier.

Speaker 2: 33:38

Right, marketing is bullshit. Right, let's take something that is super. It's all for stupid sfs. Right, like, don't elaborate, embellish what your product is actually used for. Just say what the fuck people are actually doing with it, right to your point what the fuck does that mean?

Speaker 3: 33:51

yeah, because then you're gonna you're gonna get to use it to the site, like what the fuck does this mean? Like what does this even mean? Like I don't know what this means. You have these blanket statements and then they're not going to convert and so, like you know, people like you can't have too many words on a website. I would actually argue that we're going to see a shift in that and you're going to see more websites going to like what does this actually do and what does the pain point? It's solved for, uh, and I think you're going to maybe, maybe leads my number of leads might drop off, but the quality will go up because people will be like I understand what this is saying. I'm interested in learning about 100 that's the trade-off.

Speaker 2: 34:25

People have to be willing to make it. By people, I mean people that are entrenched in these traditional, like moneyball, models. Oh, we need x number of leads to get y number of pipe, and what have you like?

Speaker 3: 34:33

you got to sacrifice the volume for the quality you got to sandbag those numbers, though it's for the board that you know the company that you've overvalued by 10x. So, yeah, you're not wrong, yep, yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:49

I I agree with that. My favorite one on this list is actually a sales loft, where they say that our customers use sales loft for revenue orchestration, whereas, if anyone knows what sales loft does, the customers say that we use sales loft to automate follow-up emails and schedule sales calls. That like don't. I guess the biggest takeaway here is don't make your customers try to figure out what you do. Just tell them what the fuck you do. Nobody has a lot of time to waste and your company is not a special snowflake 100%.

Speaker 3: 35:19

Yeah, this was sales loft, the yo-yo mob revenue orchestration.

Speaker 2: 35:23

Jesus man Speaking of not having time to waste. We are unfortunately almost at time with our free Zoom here, speaking of things that we think versus things that you may think. Let us know what you think about the podcast so far. Reach out to pod at marketingqualifiedio, Dig into your thought listener mail and let us know what disconnect you see between how companies you know are talking about themselves versus what companies are talking about themselves, versus what they what they companies are saying about themselves versus what their actual customers are saying. Dan, thank you for doing this. Come back anytime.

Speaker 1: 35:53

Thanks, thanks for having me guys. Thanks for coming. Dan, thanks for coming to the roast of Chris Newman today. Everyone we appreciate it. We'll be here next same time, same time next week you.