Introduction and Salesforce Frustrations

Speaker 1 0:17

Hey everyone, welcome back to Marketing Qualified. I'm Mike Griffin and I'm Chris Newton. Chris, I gotta be honest with you, man. I would love to do the usual thing where we go back and forth about a show that we're the only two people that actually care about, but I got some shit I just got to get off my chest today. You cool with diving right in? Let's do it. Yeah, let's go for it. Okay, I'm coming in hot because I have been fun fact life update at a new place right now got a new job since the last time that we do this. There are a host of things I'll probably smatter in throughout the course of our conversation today with respect to that, but the biggest question I want to pose to you right now, for you personally as well as anyone that you know in your professional or personal network does anyone actually like Salesforce?

Speaker 2 1:10

I'm going to go with no, and the reason I say that is because pretty much everybody I've worked with they felt it's a necessity and when something's necessary you tend to like not want to use it like it's. It's always been a necessary evil and pretty much every company I've worked with you know both go ahead, why? Why? I just think it's one of those things where it's like what people do it's like oh, we, just we use salesforce. And it's the kind of thing where once you start using salesforce, just like any other, and it's the kind of thing where once you start using Salesforce, just like any other drug, like it's impossible to get off of without some kind of intervention. So I'm hoping that you're bringing some intervention like ideas to the table, like how can companies like get off Salesforce and, you know, switch to something that doesn't make them miserable?

Speaker 1 2:03

It's such a tough question to answer, right, Because, to your point, it's like it's so ingrained, it's like something that's always been there and like maybe we should take a step back for a minute. Right, Like Salesforce was basically and still is, according to them and their market positioning, like the CRM. Right, Like I can't tell you how many places that I've either consulted with or like been a member of where it's like, oh, we have a sales inefficiency or a revenue operations blind spot, or maybe it's just our go-to-market team is just not humming and whistling in the way they ought to be. We should get Salesforce right. And so, right off the bat, it's let's introduce a new piece to our tech stack to solve like a problem or an aptitude challenge, which is a false hope.

Why Salesforce Is So Problematic

Speaker 1 2:53

And then it's the best part about I used to say this all the time when we were back at HubSpot and we were working with people that wanted to keep Salesforce as their CRM and use HubSpot for the marketing automation, all the other top of funnel stuff the best part about Salesforce is also the worst part about Salesforce, in that it is so customizable and everyone that is customizing their Salesforce ultimately ends up regretting it once the person that set up the setup leaves right, Like I was talking with someone in my new gig recently about how, if you need a dedicated like admin person or like there's entire industry off of being a Salesforce consultant, not a great product, not like a user-friendly product at least not for the non-technically inclined folks which, by the way, I would argue are the majority of people trying to like make sense of the shitty data that is in their CRM, like you and me. I don't know you got an opinion on that.

Speaker 2 3:45

No, I think you hit the nail right on the head. I mean, if you need to pay an entire role, you know these people make, like you know, 120, 130, 150,000 a year. You know potentially even more if you're a really good Salesforce admin. If you need to pay somebody for that kind of role where they're not even like doing like a lot of the traditional rev ops stuff, like their whole job is to basically know how to use salesforce without adding any additional value that you might get out of like a standard rev ops leader or something like that, I think that's a huge red flag. First of all, and like like you were saying, like if the software itself is so difficult and so you know, customizable, which is a good in a lot of cases, but B, if it's customized in a way that's stupid and doesn't make any fucking sense, then what's the point? You know it's like you know you could go into 10 different companies all using Salesforce and have 10 different implementations and like different, using different plugins or you know different, different plugins or different I forget what they're called inside of Salesforce just different extensions or whatever, where it's just really difficult to even make sense of the data and even some things that Salesforce just gives you out of the box, like the difference between a contact object and a lead object. I've seen that cause tons of issues at different companies, where you know a traditional lead would come in and then you know you get the lead and then you have to convert it to a contact so that you can create the opportunity and just like a lot of that different stuff is so complicated.

Speaker 2 5:15

I think that HubSpot actually does it well, where you know you have a contact and then you can have different lead stages on the contact record. But basically, if you're a human, if you're an email address, you're a contact in HubSpot versus in Salesforce. You could be a lead or you could be a contact, but then, like some, something gets lost when you like convert a lead to a contact or you know. It just becomes way too messy if, like it's an existing business where, like, half the people at the company are contact, half are leads, it's just. It's just been a whole nightmare situation and I actually heard one of the companies I used to work for. There are a lot of people used to be ex-salesforce employees, like they used to work at salesforce and then they ended up going to the startup. They even said that salesforce doesn't even use that themselves, like they don't even they don't even use the lead object at Salesforce because it became too complicated, is that like a drug dealer not getting a high on their own supply.

Speaker 1 6:13

What is the appropriate analogy parallel to that? That's fucking insane to me. So why offer something that you yourself say what you will about some of the mishaps and whatever that some of these other companies go through? Right, but at least they're eating their own dog food, right? Salesforce is providing something that isn't even being actively used by them. Like, why not have the rest of your ecosystem benefit from a similar type of change?

Speaker 2 6:36

Right, exactly, and I think that a lot of the problem too is that Salesforce now is like they're like a 25-year-old company, like they were started in. Like they're like a 25 year old company like they were started in like 1999 or 2000, or something like that. You know, classically known as like the very first like SaaS app or, you know, the very first SaaS platform. That's not an advantage for a company like this, like when you have that much legacy systems. Like you know, even if you look at Salesforce, you see like the new, like lightning experience, which is more like up toto-date, modern or whatever. But in a lot of places of the app you still see like the legacy ui from like 2001 and it looks like it.

Speaker 2 7:11

You know, it's like all these like outdated things and, like a lot of the times they don't work together and you know it's. It's just a kind of a clusterfuck, to be completely honest it's an absolute clusterfuck.

The Corporate Design Struggle

Speaker 1 7:24

It's real disaster.

Speaker 1 7:25

And why that sucks so bad is because, as marketing budgets continue to shrink as demand gen, demand capture, folks honestly even brand marketing managers now are feeling more of this pinch to be able to tell that complete end user journey and report on both quantitative and qualitative marketing touch points that are influencing sales quotas, pipeline generation.

Speaker 1 7:50

Once that stuff gets into Salesforce if it's making it in at all, by the way, there are plenty of places that do not have Salesforce talking effectively to the other parts of their tech stack and so there's this massive blind spot in there Then you have to go in and deal with all the pain in the ass like report complexities and just I watched actually at my new job, our Salesforce admin person apply basically like or logic to a report and man, I gave, like Deadpool, maximum effort to watching him put in the filter criteria and and it broke my brain.

Speaker 1 8:26

I'm just so used to and again like full disclosure former HubSpotters here, right, so very biased take. But I'm so used to just like clicking a button and very easily being able to say all right, populate this list or this report if criteria A or criteria B, without having to use some fucking calculus equation to help me understand how many leads, opportunities et cetera have been created as a result of a touchpoint or an engagement with a marketing campaign. Seems like a pretty straightforward thing to me. What do I know?

Speaker 2 8:56

Yeah, exactly, and like it's just crazy that a lot of businesses like a brand new startup that doesn't need all the complexity and all the customization that salesforce needs, like a crm at the, you know, in 2025, is basically a commodity. It doesn't like there's only so much you can do in terms of, like organizing your customer and company data and whatnot. So you know, just, it's crazy that a lot of companies come along and they're like we're gonna get salesforce and we're gonna customize the fuck out of it. You know, because we know better than some established companies that have been doing this for a while and it's just so unnecessary. And then you know you have to. You lose so much time. You know, getting your employees up to speed and like training them on how to use this. And, like you know, a lot of places will use Salesforce because like, oh, you know, I'm going to hire a sales team and my sales team would already know how to use Salesforce.

Speaker 1 9:47

But it doesn't necessarily mean that they know how to use your Salesforce Exactly, exactly. Such a big difference there. Such a big difference, really important, distinguishing, a very important distinction to make. Also, by the way, just when it comes to taking Salesforce data and pushing it into like tangible example, right now I'm trying to create some net new, like third party audiences, using Salesforce data to build a lookalike audience based on Salesforce data that exists and it just is clunky in a lot of ways, right Like in getting the right information and having it be accurately formatted across different field types, and that's not necessarily a problem. That's unique to Salesforce, but I can certainly tell you that it feels extra fictitious trying to do something simple like this in Salesforce, pushing information into other places.

Speaker 1 10:34

Sorry, final thing on this we can talk about anything else, but it's just like I, for the last two weeks, have been deep into our marketing impact on pipeline, on revenue and all this stuff in my new jobs current Salesforce instance. There has not been a single instance in which I did not need to export a Salesforce report to do additional filtering and additional data cleanup and additional visualization, because they're reporting the pie charts and shit like that out of the box. It's terrible, difficult to customize. There hasn't been one instance where I haven't had to do an export and do a bunch of extra lifting in sheets anyhow. So this is just end rant.

Speaker 2 11:13

Love you, salesforce have you ever been to dreamforce?

Speaker 1 11:18

you know, I haven't actually maybe that's.

Speaker 2 11:20

What I need is just to go and like, completely suck down that light baby blue Kool-Aid and see yeah, if I never need to see a shitty like what are those things that you have behind you, like the pops, like the? Funko Pops yeah, like a Funko Pop version of Albert Einstein. Fuck that, it's so fucking stupid. Like I'm sorry, like, if you like the Funko Pop Albert Einstein like the Salesforce mascot, please email us, because I would love to tear you in the asshole.

Speaker 1 11:52

Theory of general suckativity is what he is for, salesforce.

Speaker 2 11:55

Also, don't even get me going on the corporate Memphis. This is a term I learned a couple weeks ago. Corporate Memphis is that design philosophy where it's I'm sure you've, you've seen I'm actually going to just quickly share my screen it's the. It's like that corporate design of like these weird, fucking, like out of proportion figures with like blue skin that are on every fucking copycat website, every copycat like sass website these days. I'm I'm gonna share my screen, just quickly mike here and you can see what I'm talking about. Yeah, I have no clue what you're talking about okay, yep the second.

Speaker 2 12:30

I showed it to him. He's he's right away. Like what? What is this one right, right here. This is like. This is from webflow or something. It looks like some blue lady sucking a dick or something like how is it? How is this going to help them sell more software? Like I don't, I just don't even understand Brand baby, it's all about the brand.

Speaker 1 12:49

We'll say this every podcast. Now, if you don't have a good product, you gotta lean into brand to sell something and apparently the vast majority of these dumb ass companies feel like that. Brand design, that marketing go to market.

Speaker 2 13:00

emotion, that redundant marketing go to market is going to get it done for them. Super tiny head, huge feet and huge pants and purple skin. That's what's going to help sell more of this shitty fucking product. Exactly, exactly. Also, before we move on, I want to circle back to one thing that you said Frictitious. Would you care to elaborate? It sounds like you're combining friction with issues.

Speaker 1 13:28

There's a general issue, so my wife would be the first to tell you. I have a tendency to make up words and make them sound. Other examples templatize fictitious things of this nature. Fictitious used in a sentence oh, I already used it. Used it in a sentence, I don't know how to define it. It's just a fucking pain in the ass, right, it's like extra hard. There's extra like bumps along the way, things that make it super challenging to just like do what you're going to do. Fictitious used to describe a hemorrhoid process that you're dealing with. It doesn't need to be as complicated as it is Kind of like this explanation.

Speaker 2 14:02

I like that. I think you just coined the new term, that might be the term of 2025.

Speaker 1 14:07

Man no pressure.

Building Better Sales-Marketing Relationships

Speaker 2 14:09

No pressure. It's like fictitious being something that's not true combined with fictitious, with friction Something that's frictional combined with something that's not true. I don't know. Here's something that's fictitious.

Speaker 1 14:24

You need Salesforce? No, you don't. That's fictitious. You can use any fucking CRM.

Speaker 2 14:30

Nice, I see what you did there. Just bring everything back to how much Salesforce sucks. Could also be like fricking frictitious fricking. Fricking used to emphasize or express annoyance with someone or something. Fricking and friction fictition listen.

Speaker 1 14:53

If you guys got better ideas, let us know. Reach out to us. We're just spitballing here.

Speaker 2 14:57

We're just spitballing um, cool, uh, but before we move on, I also want to touch on another thing that you said. Uh, you mentioned, uh, deadpool in in something earlier. I didn't catch that reference, although I did want to talk to you about deadpool versus wolverine. I just saw that like a couple weeks ago. Curious to hear your thoughts on that and how we might be able to take that back to marketing.

Speaker 1 15:19

Okay, in reverse order, I thought the marketing for the movie was excellent. Right, they had years of buildup to it, the whole Hugh Jackman thing. You'll remember the commercial where it's like they were going to give. They, being Hugh Jackman, and Ryan Reynolds were going to give every detail about the movie and then there's just like some boisterous noise going on in the background. It was just brilliant how it was and also just like the soundtrack that was used in the commercials and how it tied back to what was happening in the actual movie. I thought a lot of that was pretty brilliant. Right, in terms of the actual movie itself, I'll tell you what I've heard in terms of the biggest critique of it from other people that I've talked to about it and they found it actually leaned too heavily into vulgarity, the dick jokes, the cursing, and also a little bit too hard on the nostalgia, like someone specifically called out Electra caught a strain One of the conversations I was having. That shows a spoiler alert, by the way, if you haven't seen the movie. Yeah, so like the cameos that came in from from the old, like Fox Universe folks, and I kind of disagree with both of those things. I thought it was an awesome movie for both of those reasons.

Speaker 1 16:26

If you think about Deadpool and how outrageous he is from the comics I don't pretend to be a comic nerd, but that's super true to character nerd, but that's like super true to character. If you think about like, the point of that movie is like we are closing the chapter on all these beloved characters who for a long time were operating in their own standalone universes, now bringing them together for one more. What is the? Is it the final act right in a play where you go out, you like you know, you bid farewell and like we don't see you again? Like now all these people are officially entering the mcu and it I don't know, it just made a lot of sense to me. I thought it was pretty well done in terms of closing the chapter, laying the foundation for maybe reintroducing those characters or like iterations of them, for moving forward. So you think about like again laying the foundation for future marketing that you'll do in these movie promotions. I I have nothing really bad to say about it.

Form Gating and Lead Generation Debate

Speaker 2 17:15

What about you? I definitely agree. I enjoyed it. I watched it with my wife and we were just dying laughing towards a lot of parts of it. I particularly liked the Chris Evans cameo. I thought that was really well done. Yeah, I thought that was pretty good. Yeah, I will say that my wife's favorite part of it by far was dog pool. I think dog pool was the hit of the, the hit of the um, the movie, and we also found out that it's actually a real dog. Like the dog actually looks like that. I thought it was like a cg, like tongue, like flopping out of its mouth and like it actually like won like the ugliest dog in the world contest and they're like fuck it, bring the dog in. This is dog pool now is that a real thing?

Speaker 1 18:00

that's had the ugliest dog contest 100.

Speaker 2 18:02

Yeah, I mean, unless I mean it's probably fake news. I read online but I mean that's what I read is that it won like the ugliest dog in the world and like it even went to like the premiere and shit, like with that's amazing tongue flopping.

Speaker 1 18:13

And so what I'm hearing is that this dog is both more successful and has a more busy social calendar than you or I do. Oh yeah, a hundred percent, a hundred percent, great Great. Add that to the confidence boost list. I'll tell you something that's giving me a bit of a lift recently, and so I mentioned toward the beginning I've started a new gig and what I'm about to say to you may sound preposterous.

Speaker 1 18:35

I want you to feel really grounded in this. I think I have a good sales team. I do. I think I have a sales team that understands the value of marketing. I think I have a sales team that is truly willing to give constructive feedback and directional guidance on things and that actually has like a basic understanding of marketing principles and best practices and has a bit of empathy for the challenge of. You know, there may not be the perfect filter in your meta audience composition that will perfectly target these folks, so we have to cast a bit of a wider net and maybe that transcends multiple lines of businesses and what have you. But this is the first time in a while, man, where I feel like and I'm in the honeymoon phase less than really two and a half full months into the job but we'll ask you the same question again six months from now and we'll see what if your answers I can't wait to play this back and like, oh boy, I I sure hope I was right.

Speaker 1 19:39

I am right. But yeah, dude, it feels like we're on the same team, uh, united against common foes, competitors in the super saturated market. And I just wanted to say I think that's great, like a lot of the criticisms that you and I have thrown across the aisle, I think are fair and warranted and based on, like actual experiences. So, in the name of fairness, I wanted to give just like a positive light on that. Like these kind of energies, energies, synergies I can't believe I just said synergies these type of relationships do exist. They're out there. You just have to find them and honestly work on them a little bit. But it comes from a place of mutual respect and understanding and understanding that you're working toward the same goal ultimately, and I think that comes back to like an alignment on KPIs, right?

Speaker 1 20:20

I said to someone at a happy hour last night hey, if I'm not hitting the stupid MQL target that would build this model off of guess who that fucks over? That's you right. Who can't then hit your quota in terms of opportunities created and such? So, like you're not going to hurt my feelings, tell me what I need to be doing differently to populate a top of funnel in the traditional, like acquisition model so that we can be a well-oiled machine. What do you think?

Speaker 2 20:45

Do you believe me? I mean, I would definitely want to try to poke some holes in your argument that you think that you have a good sales team, but just looking at your website, I can't find anything quick and easy as like a quick win Cause, like I looked at your demo form, by the way genius it brings them straight to a calendar, not a form that you fill out which then redirects to a calendar where you fill out the same fucking information. So, kudos to you on that. I don't know if that was you or if that was set up before you got there. Also, looking at your get started form, there there's not a phone number field to be seen in either form. Like your, your get started form is just work email password, first name, last name. Um, my, my question for you was going to be have you asked the sales team to get rid of the phone number field yet? But I don't even see one yet yeah, no, it's.

Speaker 1 21:28

It's not a thing, and I don't think it's realistic for the type of if you think about crafting a user experience towards how you know your personas want to interact with your stuff. I think that was a very deliberate decision that was made to not include it. Plus, when's the last time that you personally picked up a phone call from someone that you weren't expecting one from, or from an unknown number? Or, hey, if you downloaded an e-book recently and within 15 minutes you're getting a call from another like who do you suppose that is, and how many times have you bought, ended up making a purchase based on that interaction?

Speaker 2 22:04

I would wager if you went far between so yeah, I mean like a lot of times like, uh, if it's like a common, like known spam number, I think that the like iphone or apple or like whatever the cell phone provider, cell phone company will tell you that it's spam. You'll get that. It won't even ring on your cell phone, it'll just be spam risk or whatever, for whatever reason this one.

Speaker 2 22:24

I was actually expecting a call and this one came up where it didn't say spam risk or anything. So I answer and then you get the inevitable delay, the two, you know like the two, three second delay when, like the person who's cold calling, like a thousand fucking people, the second that somebody picks up, then there's always that delay and they're always like hello, and then just their state of disbelief.

Speaker 2 22:48

That someone answered want to be like. You called me like why the fuck are you saying hello? The way this works is I say hello and then you tell me who the fuck you are and why you're calling.

Speaker 1 22:58

Right, typically speaking.

Speaker 2 23:00

Yeah, long story short, kudos to you and your company for not asking for a phone number. It's an outdated fucking thing to ask for, and especially on like your Calendly form, where you can book a demo. Like you're going to be booking a demo on like a zoom or google meet or whatever it is. So like you don't need a fucking number because it generates the link automatically. So don't even fucking ask for something that you don't need.

Speaker 1 23:21

So, yeah, I mean and rant there. I appreciate, appreciate the thoughts. The real-time feedback is extremely impressive, I must say, and I guess, to put a little bit of a damper on that, the calumny thing is sweet. So what chris is describing is when you get to the site you can choose your own adventure. You can either book a demo or you can go ahead and like, get started, like, create basically a product led growth type of motion. You spin up your own free trial. You see, you get approved, so on and so forth. If you go with the book demo route, you're prompted with a couple of questions, but it's via Calendly, right, not a traditional form field. Or when you entered in the initial form, then you're immediately presented with a reps calendar. This is a play that Chili Piper has been running for a while.

Speaker 1 23:58

Calendly has tried to come a long way. I actually don't know if HubSpot has a comparable functionality with their meetings links. They didn't back in the day, as I recall. But regardless of that, the trouble that I'm running into right now is actually attribution on that. I don't know that there's a ton of meetings being booked, but because it's not like a direct form submission, then traditional, like demand gen folks like well, how do I capture the efficacy of that as like a motion on the site? And so what we've started to do is try to implement different like Google analytics events or trying to stand up HubSpot right now in the trial mode.

Speaker 1 24:29

It's just like a custom behavioral event where it's like how many button clicks did that receive and did that person obviously have like a website session, so you can kind of correlate the volume of sessions to the site and clicks on that button with how many meetings actually end up on a rep's calendar via calendly. Like theoretically, there's some way on the back end that you can see that in salesforce and that that's been kind of like. The next thing to kind of parse through is figuring out how to accurately. Ultimately it doesn't matter, right, like you know, marketing has its metrics, sales has its metrics. But if, like, the company is hitting the pipeline quota and the revenue quota, then the whole go to market machine is good and I think that, like again just to give some credit here there's less concern about like who's getting credit from an attribution standpoint Is it marketing or is it sales? It's like like how are we doing collectively maybe?

Speaker 2 25:21

that's because of the size of the company. Yeah, I mean, you bring up a good point. It's always good to balance, like you know, attribution, make sure that you're doubling down on things that are working and filtering out things that aren't. And obviously knowing where your demos is coming from is important, but I would argue that you'd never want to let that come in the way of user experience. Always optimize for the user first and the results will follow. I mean just not to put on my consultant hat, but just looking at the way that you have things currently set up, why didn't you just embed Calendly directly into the website and then that way you can have the tracking right on the page and then, once they fill out the Calendly link, that'll do the booking through the Calendly embed or whatever, and then you can redirect them to a thank you page and then use that to fire a pixel to let HubSpot or whatever know that your ad that they clicked on is valid, but what you're describing makes a ton of sense to do.

Speaker 1 26:13

I'll probably take that. I don't know what your billable rate is per hour, but we'll make sure that we get you. We'll get you a check for for the, for the feedback is something else I was going to say about the, the flow. Oh no, that's what it was. Is that just talking about, like the ability to like quantify investment and like how much is marketing actually contributing to pipeline and all that kind of stuff?

Speaker 1 26:35

Again, at the same happy hour from last night I was at, one of the reps said to me like there hasn't been a call that I've hopped on in the last month where someone hasn't known about us already. Like they have brand recognition. I don't have to. I can skip the first. You know three slides of my discovery call deck. Because they have brand familiarity, they get what it is we offer I was trying to get into, like the weeds. They want to talk brass tacks sooner and that is one of the coolest things that a marketer whether or not you're in demand, gen or brand or, you know, pmm, like all that, like that's talking music to the ears and that's pretty cool.

Speaker 1 27:08

So I hope that you listeners are getting some type of feedback for that and if you're not, ask sales, sales. How heavy of a lift are you doing just setting the table when you're hopping on these discovery calls? How can I alleviate the pain point that comes with having to pitch someone on the company? You're going to see better deal velocity as a result. I would posit. That's my take. Well said, well said, thank you. I want to talk to you about attribution and pose to you a question that is completely loaded putting traditional lead magnets, ebooks, white papers, etc. Behind a form gating, if you will, friend or foe as a tactic.

Speaker 2 28:03

I would say it largely depends on the company and the content being gated.

Wrapping Up and Future Episodes

Speaker 2 28:08

Obviously, if it's really good content that you know took a lot of time and money to create, there should be some kind of exchange of value, you know, and typically that exchange of value is at least an email address or some information like that. Yeah, I'd say it largely depends on the company. Like if you asked me 10 years ago, I would say you know, you say you should be gating everything other than a blog post that you're trying to rank for for SEO. If it's an ebook or white paper or anything like that, you would want to gate. I want to gate anything like super bottom funnel in terms of competitor comparisons or case studies or anything that's designed to close a sale. I think that that's stupid. If you're trying to close a sale, you don't want that stuff gated. But if you're trying to generate leads, then you know, obviously gating is a good way to do that. But I don't know, man, like it just goes back to what we talked about with Salty Dana, you know, a couple months back is, you know, the best, the best form of gating is product led growth and just like getting people into the product where you know they can at least familiarize with themselves with it. And then if they want more help and if it seems like something that they're interested in and they can reach out to either book a demo or contact support. And then, you know, try to get. You know, like you said earlier, like choose your own adventure. Like not everyone wants to sit through a 30 minute demo where you know it's basically just serving the sales team, you know, to do fact, fighting to see if the prospect is going to be a good fit for the company.

Speaker 2 29:37

Let the prospect tell you if they're a good fit for the company through their actions or through you know, as far as I'm concerned, like if somebody wants to pay you money, then they're probably going to be a good fit for the company. Like, if they don't see the value of it, then maybe they're too small. You know they might not be a good fit for a company, but let them kind of qualify themselves out rather than you know, you pre-qualifying them out before they even get a chance, cause you don't always know what the person is on the other end of of the. You know on the other side is in what their, what their deal is and whether or not they'd be a good fit.

Speaker 2 30:12

Um, I know that's a little bit of a rant away from the question, but yeah, I'd say that largely like gating, like the best gate you're ever going to have is like a free, like a get started free or a free trial or something like that. And yeah, in terms of gating content like it, it largely depends. But I mean, I'd say that typically, like a lot of content right now, it's going to be more valuable being out in the open, especially if it's something that your competitors are not gating, then you, you don't want to gate it, right For that reason, I don't know. I think that resonates.

Speaker 1 30:47

I think what you're saying resonates a lot. So it definitely does depend on the type of content, the type of company. What have you? I would argue that if you've spent a bunch of calories creating this proprietary research that you've put into a white paper or a report, you're probably warranted in gating that. But even so, I could be persuaded persuaded otherwise.

Speaker 1 31:06

In general, like ebooks and classic top of funnel lead magnets, I actually think that's better served as an ungated pillar page or even an extension on a given solution page. Less frequently in the latter use case. But, yeah, like you and I are both like huge fans of seo. Like what better way we used to talk about packaging up four to five similar blog posts to create a lead magnet that was downloadable behind a form and like that's just so antiquated at this point. Right, you need domain authority, you need to be. What was the featured snippet of yesterday is now the AI summary, right, and getting linked to that in the Google, in Bing SERPs? I don't know, I just think it's.

Speaker 1 31:45

I think you're better served putting it out there, establishing that trust, retargeting people that are hitting that URL of the ungated asset and then, when they are ready to take that more high intent conversion, that closer to purchase proximity conversion like starting up a trial, requesting a demo then you've already done a lot of the work, you've established a lot of the trust and I just think it's a better bid in general. So that's a younger company I'm at. They only have a small handful of previously gated assets. That's the crusade I'm on right now. Let's just make this stuff available and when they're ready to purchase from us, they will. That's my take.

Speaker 2 32:22

Yeah, I agree. And one note on that too is like, when you get something to like, don't ask for a fucking phone number, don't ask for any information where people are like why, why do you need this from me? Like, at the most I'd say that I mean, you can get so much information from an email, like, if you put in an email into LinkedIn, you can figure out what their job title is, you can figure out what company they work at, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 32:48

Are you suggesting there are?

Speaker 2 32:49

enrichment sources. That's an entirely other beast that we could get into on the next podcast. But yeah, you can get so much information from an email, so just ask yourself what information is valuable and then, if you can't get it from an email, then maybe it makes sense to ask for that in addition to an email or something. But don't make people fill out like a six, seven, eight form field just to get your white paper on you know whatever.

Speaker 1 33:18

Totally Conversely to that, though, if you are indicating and providing a lot of value up front, then I actually think you're warranted in asking for a question. It doesn't have to be phone number, right, that's going to be like the common enemy here, but like things will actually help you and your sales team qualify folks that are taking these high intent conversions beyond what enrichment can do. You're warranted for asking for those type of fields in your demo request, in your talk to sales form right, and the reason I think you're warranted in doing that is because, a some of the nerds I follow on LinkedIn say so and they have some data to prove this out, but B that just makes sense to me, right, luke Gromen? Like you've given all this other stuff for free, you are warranted in getting a little bit of information to make sure that you're putting them to the appropriate like subject matter expert internally, especially when your business has multiple product offerings, multiple lines of business. That's the.

Speaker 1 34:03

I think the exception to when you should be putting more form fields in front of them is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I think so. Uh, speaking of things being in front of you, our free zoom timer is in front of us and we are winding down. We're gonna have to cap it there for today, but boy, oh boy, do we still have some things to get off our chest? So, chris, same time next week let's do it.

Speaker 2 34:25

Yeah, let yeah, let's do it. We got to get back on a regular uh, or I guess, not get back on. We need to establish a regular cadence where we're actually putting these out once a week and getting them edited and all that stuff. So that's, that's definitely on me, that's it's on both of us to to make that happen. But, yeah, we're, we're aiming for 20 because we we read that you know, I think it's like 95 or 99% of podcasts don't make it past episode 20. So we're trying to get to 21 before we quit.

Speaker 1 34:52

So we're done. You guys find your new venting source All right, man, good to see you Appreciate everyone listening in and we'll talk again soon. Thanks all you.