Funnel Reboot podcast

This is the second episode in a series on having a thriving career. There is one specific subfield where this challenge is harder than usual - it's marketing within paid and organic search. There are always new tools and techniques coming along, and In our guest's opinion, to be a search marketing professional means upgrading yourself, to master them while the iron is still hot.  I'll be talking with someone who has dealt with more than her fair share of change - but who feels she is better as a result. Originally from Peru, Giannina Fumigalli has lived in Montreal Canada for the last 18 years and who has been working in digital marketing that whole time, including both agency and client-side roles. She is currently the Growth Marketer at Vircom, a pioneer in B2B Email Security. All people and things mentioned can be found via episode 162's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot site.

There's a lot you need to deal with in a marketing career, such as:  What skills you should chase after when in an entry-level vs what's needed at higher levels How to manage both above and below your level What continuous learning actually looks like Knowing when a job isn't panning out and you need to cut  your losses Balancing whether to join a company based on the brand's cachet, the title, the salary and what you will get out of the experience Advice when interviewing for marketing roles - what she looks food when hiring How to cultivate your profile within your organization When to stay a generalist, or when to gain a specific skill by joining a special project  This episode's guest is eminently qualified to cover these topics. Marissa Homere is the VP of Marketing at Irwin, an investor relations and capital markets software company. She is a demand generation leader and for the last decade, she has built and scaled marketing teams in a wide range of industries. She also teaches in an online marketing program.  In this episode, Marissa shares her thoughts on the marketing industry as a whole, how young professionals can be best prepared for today’s rapidly changing environment, and what it takes to succeed in a fast-paced marketing role. Most importantly, she talks about how, as a wife and mother, how societal issues have muscled in on her life as a marketer. Like being a working parent, handling old oppressive tendencies in the workplace, struggling to balance career ladder-climbing with family responsibilities.  Links to all people and items mentioned are available on the Funnel Reboot shownotes page.

If you want to learn about sales and start Googling, you quickly run across self-professed gurus, who claim to know the secret to selling. If you faithfully follow this method (available today only for a low low price), you'll have sales success. Despite feeling a twinge of skepticism about their pitch, you're so deep into their slick, pressure-filled pitch at this point that you pay for their books and courses…which end up being disappointing.  Today's guest says these gurus have put you in the Vortex of crazy.  He doesn't try to apply the same advice to everyone - his response reminds me of what an ancient Buddhist guru said. Well, according to a novel written a century ago by Hermann Hesse.  There are a few men on a spiritual pilgrimage, and they reach a stage where the leader, Siddhartha, tells his followers that he must  continue on alone. His right-hand man, Govinda asks him why, "Siddhartha…spoke quietly… “Always, oh Govinda, you’ve been my friend, you’ve always walked one step behind me. Often I have thought: Won’t Govinda for once also take a step by himself, without me? Behold, now…[you] are choosing your path for yourself.” Our guest says there's only one sales method that works  -  the one that comes naturally to you. That refreshing take ripples through his 2023 book Do It! Selling. David Newman has been working since 1992 to help customers land better clients, bigger deals, and higher fees. From Fortune 500 corporations to sole-practitioners, his firm has helped over 1,800 clients with their marketing, sales, and professional services. David is also the host of the highly rated podcast, The Selling Show. David is married to the #1 most amazing woman on the planet (his words, not mine), launched two great kids into the world disguised as small adults, and has enjoyed raising some of the world’s sweetest retrievers. Links to every item mentioned appears in the show's page at https://funnelreboot.com

How come the companies you hear boasting about their growth rarely seem to rack up impressive growth numbers? For all those that talk the talk, very few can say they have doubled their revenue in the last 3 years. And yet, according to our guest today, by simply increasing new sales by 15%/yr and selling 15% more per year to existing clients, doubling revenue is totally achievable. In the 27 years since he graduated with his MBA, Darrell Amy has worked  heavily in the tech sector, mainly in sales and marketing. Wanting to help a larger number of companies, in 2004 he started his own business, speaking and acting as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer. In 2020, Darrell authored Revenue Growth Engine book  How To Align Sales & Marketing To Accelerate Growth. He is a member of the Forbes Business Council and co-chair of the Kingdom Missions Fund. Based in Arkansas, with a family that now includes a couple of grand-children, let's go talk to Darrell Amy. Links to everythings mentioned in the episode can be found at the https://funnelreboot.com shownotes page.

The relationship between those who generate creative work and the rest of us in revenue-related roles can be …strained. From those I've talked to in graphics or visual arts, being left to their lonesome makes it hard producing creative that's exactly what the marketers and other stakeholders wanted.  That's one reason why I hope you listen to today's talk with a graphic designer who wrote a guide for other graphic designers.  To help your interactions with your creative counterparts.  The other reason is this author's healthy outlook…on everything. I was first exposed to how zen-like he was when I met him at an event in 2017. Reading LinkedIn updates over the next few years I marveled how he did everything at his design agency, his training business and his college lecturing. When we met again (virtually) in 2020 , he talked about everything he had going on, but in that same calm tone.  So by the time he came out with his second book this last year - "Stop Looking for Zebras", I seized the chance to let you hear his unique viewpoint for yourself.  Let's go hear from our guest Robert Smith who will explain the book's title, and much much more. All people and items mentioned are linked in the episode's show page.

"So, what does your company do?" This is a simple question, which should have a simple answer. Yet whenever I'm asked it, I feel the tug to drift into a talk-track full of feature dumps.  This, and other sales sins, lead to situations that lose potential sales. They put all of marketing's hard work at risk of going to waste. Meticulously-crafted content, research on ICPs and  intent-based campaigns aimed at key Accounts can all be for naught if sales doesn't have a game-plan for their conversation with the prospect. It is at this point that companies seek the help of our guest  After getting his Ph.D. at Stanford Brent Keltner spent ten years as a social scientist at the RAND Corporation.  While he liked using his academic training, he looked for places his knowledge could be more practically applied.  Jumping to enterprise and early stage companies, he found gaps in their revenue function. But also found he could get sales teams unstuck from specific challenges with a bit of theoretical modeling.  After more than a decade of experience as a revenue leader, he founded Winalytics LLC, a go-to-market and revenue consultancy whose clients include DealerRater, Lexmark, and Ascend Learning. He continued developing his list of situations and corresponding plays, which led to the publishing of his collection of The Revenue Acceleration Playbook which Brent came out with in 2022.  Links to everything mentioned in the show is on the Funnel Reboot site's episode page.

In this episode, I spoke with Danny Decker about the book he co-wrote with RJon Robins, "The Automatic Marketing Machine" which came out in 2022. The book combines direct marketing, nurturing emails and retention tactics to form a sustainable supply of ready-to-buy leads.   Danny Decker spent most of his childhood in West Africa, where his parents were missionaries. When he was young, he saw people spending a large portion of their day getting water. In a similar way, businesses struggle to get a steady supply of prospects, even though leads are as important to business owners as water.  In their frantic bid to fill their funnel, they commit random acts of marketing, looking to Danny just like the villagers that he once watched use up precious energy, spending much of their time on just subsisting.   He is based in Huntersville, NC with his wife, two kids, and a hyperactive German shepherd. Through the Automatic Marketing Agency, Danny now shows businesses how to secure their prospect-supply by building marketing systems that work to help businesses reach their full potential.    Links to everything mentioned appear in the shownotes at https://funnelreboot.com

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Throughout  our youth we are subtly encouraged to fit into our surroundings, staying on the expected path of taking our studies as far as we can before getting a job. Today's guest didn't do that, dropping out of high school to go work in the retail sector.  Because she was a go-getter, she was recruited in 1997 to join in a retail experiment by a telecom carrier. At that time, cellphones were exclusively a corporate thing; they were seeing whether there could be a consumer market for them. That turned out to be a great money-making opportunity.  That led to her owning her own physical store called Parlez Wireless, that operated as an authorized dealer for that carrier. She sold the franchise six years later and since then she has been providing consulting support to other businesses in Service and Retail sectors, as well as Speakers, Consultants and Authors. After hearing the unconventional path she took, you can see why her philosophy on marketing isn't the same as everyone else. She believes using those old tired ways yields merely mediocre results, and she wants companies to do better than that. So  she teamed up with Alan Weiss  in 2022 to write her second book, "Masterful Marketing".  I first met her a dozen years ago at a Podcasters Across Borders conference and I'm so glad to have you join me to hear from Lisa Larter. Shownotes include links to all people and products mentioned.

Johan van de Werken thrives best at the sweet spot between data, business & technology.  Graduating with a philosophy degree from the University of Utrect, my guest started his career as a journalist for several Dutch publications, writing about everything from events and  pop culture to media, politics and economics. Around 2014 he switched from letters to numbers, working in CRO for several european ecommerce businesses. That led him to building dashboards and leveraging cloud platforms to turn raw data into usable marketing insights. Working at an analytics firm that exposed him to BigQuery, he thought about sharing  what he was learning. Seeing that the  domain GA4BigQuery.com was available, he registered it and started posting there as a side gig. It got noticed by Simo Ahava, the founder of Simmer. That led Johan the release of the GA4 and BigQuery course on their training platform. As we fast forward to 2023, GA4BigQuery is now a well-known resource for marketers. And its creator is now consulting full-time on data analytics under his own brand, Select Star.  Except for when he's having fun playing in a punk rock cover band. See Shownotes for all people and links mentioned in the episode.

Data warehouses are amazing things: you can toss all kinds of information into them then pull mind-blowing insights out the other end. This feat can happen because you're connected to outside systems holding their own database tables. A copy of whatever has recently gone into the table is taken out and shot through a data pipeline and pushed into your data warehouse. But today's data stacks contain Multiple clouds, hybrid environments, and so many data pipelines the programs in charge of monitoring and logging the flows almost can't manage them. It becomes overwhelming to manually check and ensure the quality and integrity of the data.  The more sophisticated the systems, the more errors creep into the data. If we rely on flawed data, the outcomes and insights we generate will be equally flawed. This is where data observability comes in. In this episode you will hear about something called an observability platform. It identifies real-time data anomalies and pipeline errors in data warehouses. Now there's a twist here because we're in a cloud computing environment that charges by number of computing cycles. You don't want an observability tool that's another pipe accessing client data and running up the meter. The good news is there's an easier way to detect when data has gone awry, by comparing log files - basically  metadata - they are just as effective at alerting you to problems.  If you'd like what this is doing described in a completely non-technical way, think of Hans Christian Andersen's Princess and the Pea. There is a girl who comes to a castle seeking shelter from the rain claiming to be a princess. The queen doubts whether she is truly of noble blood, and offers her a bed, but this bed has twenty mattresses and twenty down-filled comforters on it. A pea is placed underneath the bottom mattress to test if this girl detects anything. The next morning, the princess says that she endured a sleepless night; there must have been something hard in the bed. They realize then and there that she must be a princess, since no one but a real princess could be so delicate. I spoke with Yuliia Tkachova, the co-founder and CEO of Masthead Data, a company which recently received $1.3M in a pre-seed round. Originally  from Ukraine, Yuliia came to found Masthead after work that convinced her of the need for an observability solution. She had roles as a Product Manager roles at OWOX BI and Boosta, where their data solutions encountered problems. Prior to that, she did marketing for RAGT.  She has Bachelors and Masters degrees from Suma State University, specializing in MIS & Statistics. She also serves as an Organizer at MeasureCamp, a volunteer community where analytics professionals come together to learn. See Shownotes for links to all persons or products mentioned.

Analytics is something that everyone says they want, and some brag that they can analyze very well. But few people know what investment's required to build a quality analytics function, and even fewer are good at justifying its value.  Our guest Martin McGarry is so passionate about analytics, as you'll see from his  backstory, if anyone can articulate the business value of analytics, it's him.  After completing a Bachelor of Science from The University of Manchester and studying at the University of Cambridge as a Doctoral Candidate, our guest worked in the UK analytics practice of a global Management Consultancy.  Due for a change after 6 years of that, he moved to Ottawa Canada and founded his own consultancy so he could offer a more independent approach. A while later started the firm he's been leading for nearly 15 years, Bronson Analytics.  In 2018 he began a recurring event in Ottawa called Beer & Analytics, which draws hundreds from the field together for learning and socializing. In 2022, the event went outside of Ottawa for the first time, being held in Toronto.

It's fitting, given how this is Funnel Reboot's 150th episode, that we veer off of the standard format and dig into a niche within marketing that's becoming a de facto part of every marketing function and is dictating new skills that every marketer must learn. I'm talking about marketing analytics.  This episode is compiled from experts in the world of analytics. It was recorded on location at the Marketing Analytics Summit that was held in Las Vegas. It's coming  hot off the press from the June 2023 event. Full speaker list in the shownotes.

When marketers from different companies get together and talk shop, it quickly becomes noticeable that each tackles their marketing problem differently. One by one, they throw into the conversation their own homebrew of channels, output tracking and the distinct expectations their stakeholders place on them. The more this study in contrast goes on, the more you hear them ask each other: "Why do you do it that way?"  The responses to this question all fall under one unsatisfactory theme. It's like Fiddler on the Roof, a broadway musical & movie set a century ago in part of the soviet union. A community of displaced Jews move into the slavic town of Anatevka. When townspeople ask them about their quirky customs, they give their famous one-word answer - Tradition. The main character defends his ancestors for starting the Tradition, even if nobody can remember why they made them in the first place.  Some of the marketing tasks we do are grounded in logic, which can be found by probing our  institutional memory banks. But most of the time we don't probe, Instead relying on circular reasoning about the fact that we have them as justification for why we have them. Nothing changes; we cling to pointless traditions, which just ends up wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere.  Our guest knows how to give marketing functions a checkup, teasing apart the traditional practices that boost productivity from those that have run their course. She's great at scrutinizing; at asking "Why do you do it that way?" She grew up in the republic of Georgia, shortly after the Communist system of the Soviets had collapsed.  Would they transition to the new ways? Many were reluctant to, craving the familiarity of communism. This wavering delayed Georgia's emergence as a full-fledged  western economy. Perhaps Khatia came by her bold way of questioning things from seeing the damage that's caused by clinging to the past.  Khatia Odzelashvili is the founder of a company called, not surprisingly, Bold Move Marketing. She is a public relations specialist with an entrepreneurial mindset who enjoys developing and implementing creative strategies. Since finishing her education at Algonquin College as well as the University of Göttingen, she has worked with and sometimes led a client's team as they build marketing programs.

If you want to  communicate your message to others in this world, you only have four channels to choose from. Paid, Owned, Shared and Earned. If we expect to get some attention through shared and earned media, we should be prepared to face resistance, because we're competing with the biggest and most attention-grabbing stories out there. My guest Phil Gaudreau is a former journalist, who has turned his talents to serving the communication needs of other businesses. He does this through Make it Matter Media, the agency which he runs jointly with his wife Catherine. From their base in Kingston Ontario, they work with a diverse range of clients, including small and medium businesses, politicians, and not for profit organizations. Phil has also been actively engaged in the academic realm. He has worked with educational institutions such as Queens University, St. Lawrence College & Algonquin College, starting with communications roles and progressing to become a part-time professor of the subject. An area where Phil loves to apply his writing and podcasting skills is generating awareness for businesses in less-populated regions. Ever since he teamed up with an Ottawa-based publisher in 2019, he has been the front-facing piece of several media properties focused on Eastern Ontario, which is as large as, and is as sparsely populated as the State of Maine.  His profiles convey how these companies bet their future on the local labour force, and how much is at stake for the community where the company chooses to locate. If your brand, or your client's brand, shares any commonality with the ones Phil works for, then you'll agree with me that it's really tough to get media coverage for organizations like yours. That's why we need to hear from Phil, because he employs the scrappy, entrepreneurial tactics that you will need in order to get your message out there.

Small-to-mid-sized businesses make up half of the economy. When surveys are done on why one company is chosen over another, buyers most-commonly cite the people as the main factor why they buy from them.  It's great that the founders or select team members are known by those buyers. But what about those who don't know them? How can they get a wider circle to know about their expertise and how excellent they are at what they do?  The vehicle that my guest believes does this better than anything else is public speaking.  Majeed Mogharreban is a professional speaker, world traveler, and founder of ExpertSpeaker.com. Speaking professionally for 10 years, Majeed has worked with the United Nations, Fairtrade, celebrities, politicians, Olympic medal winners, CEOs, and top entrepreneurs to give speeches and tell stories that change the world.  He is the author of the international best-seller  "Expert Speaker: 5 Steps To Grow Your Business With Public Speaking" He is the highest-rated trainer in the world at Learning Tree International. Majeed resides in Quebec, Canada.

The theme of these next few episodes are channels for getting our content out there.  The concept of marketing through a podcast is familiar to a high percentage of marketers (for those listening to my show, it's 100%), but it has some quirks that other channels don't.  A key issue for those thinking about podcasting is the volume of shows that already exist. There are  arguably over a million active shows on Apple Podcasts. Why would marketing in such a crowded field be a good idea?   While this isn't a how-to on making a podcast, instead it aims to help you answer whether a podcast should be part of your marketing mix. We'll talk about: Who makes a good podcast host and what makes a good theme for a show. What podcasting has in common with PR How to get a podcast discovered by your audience.  Promotional options, from sponsored ads inserted into shows…to shows which are entirely paid promotion.   I brought someone on who sees podcasts from multiple perspectives; from the standpoint of a marketer and as a podcast host herself. Sherrilynne Starkie is an award-winning digital communications consultant with more than 20 years experience working with private and public sector clients in Canada, Britain and the USA. She has an international reputation as a social media innovator, is a prolific blogger and podcaster and is an active community volunteer. Her new podcast 50 Women Over 50 is a passion project in which she is interviewing women past their 50th birthday to learn how they see the world, what lessons they’ve learned and what advice they have for us all.

What traits do humans have that distinguish us most from other species?  There are a few answers, but one I like is from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who said it was our ability to form Society. In fact, he saw it as critical adaptation that ensures our survival:   “...the only way in which [men] can preserve themselves is by uniting their separate powers in a combination strong enough to overcome any resistance, uniting them so that their powers are directed by a single motive and act in concert.” We can apply this to society as a whole, and to smaller communities like: countries & ethnic groups, service clubs, businesses, User groups, Client forums. All are undeniably powerful.   Communities can defuse customer problems, encourage some to become brand ambassadors and provide a means of word-of-mouth marketing like no other channel can. What does it take to grow and keep a community? Our guest will help us answer that. Throughout his career, Paul Bradley has done the posting and moderating that you have to commit to if you are going to form an online community.  Paul has been building communities that connect and educate professionals across myriad industries for the last decade-plus. He has been part of Social Media Pulse (SMP) – a community of practice for social media industry professionals. He also launched and ran the community program at Agorapulse. Having moved to the education sector, he currently serves as Vice President for Kaplan Community.

Video is the most persuasive medium there is. That's why Many of us are building our marketing programs around it. Inevitably, the wildcard that crops up when we have an idea for a video is what will it take to produce it? The answers to this are all over the map.  How much production value it takes is - as much as is needed for the video to produce your desired results.  The impact a video has isn't always reflective of the amount spent.  Our guest started MultiVision Digital, a video production agency in 2010 and has made over 1,200 videos produced for every business objective. We';ll hear from him answers on this and other questions to know about planning, producing, and distributing videos.  Join me as we talk to  Robert Weiss.

As my eldest son has been in university, he's worked part-time at a sporting goods store. The section he works in is the category-leader in the store - as you can probably guess - it's shoes. Need to admit that I'm not that into shoes.  I am fascinated by the conversations my son has with customers when it comes to shoes. They not only talk about the design features of a specific shoe. They also chat about the athletes who've worn it or collaborated with the  brand to design it. They bring up details about how that athlete signed with the shoe company, the battling that went on between that brand and other companies to win the athlete's endorsement.  Clearly when people buy shoes for exercising or training for something, they aren't just going after ergonomics.    This back-story on the brand's struggles matters to them, as if they'll only wear a brand that works as hard as they do in staying fit or competing in sports.  This bond clearly applies to shoes, but it obviously reaches to many other types of brands too.  It's good for products to have a strong brand message and proof-points of their value, but the true winners are those that connect their story to the customers' internal values, or that give the customer a transformational experience.  Today I'm talking with someone who works with what he calls  'meaningful'  brands, producing their media creative in a way that resonates with buyers. Fittingly, the name of his London-based boutique agency is 'Way' My  guest is a public speaker, an ultra marathon-runner, podcaster, skydiver and minimalist.  In 2021, he released the book we're talking about today: "Not Another Pair of Shoes" Let's talk with Alexander Novicov.