Outbound Marketing Still Works
Eric Quanstrom shares his insights into why outbound marketing still works, the critical role that your website plays, and why relevance is king in all cold outreach.
[MUSIC]
>> Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Cast Me in Studios.
Today, we are joined by a special guest, Eric.
How are you?
>> I'm fine. Thanks for having me, Ian.
>> Excited to have you on the show,
excited to chat about science,
science without the S, of course,
all the cool stuff that you all are doing from marketing perspective.
We're going to get into some real fun SDR talk,
and obviously tons of demand stuff.
Let's get into it first off was your first job in demand.
>> I've got a few gray hairs,
and I actually started and led one startup back in the 1990s.
I had left a corporate job with
what was then the largest media company in the world,
and overseeing their essentially
internet division on the West Coast to join that startup.
It was a very heady time, fun, fun days back then.
>> Flash forward to today,
tell us what it means to be CMO of science.
>> It means that I get to steer the direction,
the brand, the go-to-market activities of our organization.
We've grown quite a lot over the last few years.
It's fun. I view marketing as a craft and myself as a craftsman,
and as being a head craftsman as a cool gig.
>> One of the reasons we're excited to chat with you,
we'll get into this a little bit later,
is how many CMOs have SDRs that report to them now?
>> It'll be interesting to chat through that,
and how important the SDR function is to marketing,
which in theory, it's always been important to marketing,
but now more than ever.
>> Yeah, it's funny too.
I think that best conceptualized SDRs, BDRs,
whatever you want to call them, XDRs,
just sit right in between sales and marketing.
It's always an interesting split of where they end up rolling up to,
or who they answer to at the end of the day.
>> Yeah, and I think it just depends on the organization,
how you want to do things.
But this is part of the revenue function,
making a little bit more sense these days,
and maybe a little bit less sense these days too,
that marketing growing in terms of that overall revenue function,
that it's like, yeah, it does, of course,
make sense for SDRs to roll up to marketing for some organizations,
like that makes perfect sense.
>> Right.
>> So it's a fascinating, never-ending, strategic decision.
>> That said, I've yet to hear the title RDR,
revenue development representative,
but that would be a fascinating one to have roll on up,
if you will, going forward.
>> Yeah, it makes sense, right?
>> Yeah.
>> That's the thing is, we have RevOps now, right?
Because sales ops and marketing ops living separately
didn't actually make sense.
It makes sense to have one view of revenue,
and to have someone who's not stealing from Peter to pay Paul, right?
That didn't make sense, it never did make sense.
And especially, it depends on the type of word that you have.
If you have product like growth,
if you actually own a number as a CMO versus,
like owning a revenue number,
not just owning a pipeline number,
you're literally, the website is driving revenue for your business.
You're having conversions that a salesperson never touches.
That's revenue.
>> Yeah, and it's funny that you bring up website,
because one of the things that we've been positioning,
really in the market lately, especially with science,
is the critical role that the website plays,
especially in outbound outreach,
especially in helping really capitalize
on the people that you're bringing to your website
on a daily basis,
but how many of those are you reaching back out to
and running outbound cadences that aren't converting,
that aren't raising their hand,
that aren't filling out forms on your website.
Because I would argue that's probably the biggest gap area
for most demand-gen leaders,
and their sales counterparts or revenue overseers,
depending on your org structure in 2022, going on 2023.
>> All right, let's get to our first segment.
The trust tree is where you go and feel honest and trusted,
and we can share those deepest, darkest demand-gen secrets.
Tell me a little bit about science.
Who are your customers?
>> Our customers are primarily those revenue titles,
and they reside in sales or marketing.
Historically, science has predominantly sold
to sales leadership and sales management.
That line is really starting to blur,
per my comment, of about 30 seconds ago.
And we're starting to see a lot more traction,
interest, demand, if you will,
from the marketing side of the house,
largely because we started producing our own software
and selling it separately,
in addition to bundling everything together
with a lot of our go-to-market activities
on behalf of the clients that we serve.
It's really those two predominant camps,
and then I would be remiss if I didn't include
for small to medium-sized businesses.
It's very typical that we have owner, founder, CEO, titles,
assuming essentially the revenue responsibility
or pipeline responsibility,
and is ultimately a decision-maker in our sales cycles,
and oftentimes even main point of contact in our engagements.
- Yeah, and so within that function,
how the heck do you get in front of them?
What's your marketing strategy?
- Yeah, well, we drink a lot of our own champagne
to be perfectly honest.
So we're big practitioners of what we like to call
inbound let outbound, intent let outbound,
and frankly, list let outbound.
And so when we start to think about the,
and I'll get to some of our demand-gen
and exclusively marketing techniques in a little bit,
but focusing on just those three areas for a moment,
one of the things that we prioritize on
is first and foremost developing our own ICP,
understanding who we wanna do business with.
I gave you broad strokes just a second ago.
Once we understand that, we can do a lot of things,
not the least of which is advertising
to all of those audiences.
So we have our own demand-side platform,
and we practice what we preach
and have a lot of, or a very robust kind of like,
ad-developed motion to our ICP every single day.
From there, a lot of our web traffic that we generate,
we're running outbound cadences against.
Both the folks that are raising their hands,
filling forms, inbound STRs are following up,
setting appointments and starting sales cycles with.
Those that don't raise their hands
were identifying through our own tools,
and we're ultimately running outbound sequences,
what I called inbound let outbound,
back out to those folks that match our ICP.
And that's a very robust, in fact,
it's one of our strongest kind of like outbound campaigns
that we run internally.
Largely because we're no different
than a lot of other businesses,
where we're only converting about 3%
of our web traffic visitors into,
like hand-raisers or form fills.
- Yeah.
- Seems to be around the industry average,
or maybe slightly above,
but ultimately that 97% of folks that are coming to our site,
that we can identify a certain portion of them,
and when they fit our ICP,
we wanna bring like the conversation direct to their door.
So that's a big go-to-market for us.
We also spend a lot of our time identifying intent,
and so we have our own intent tool,
and we look at who's in market,
or who might be in market for our areas of promise.
If you take kind of like a hot topic,
like lead generation services,
would be a really great example of something
that we're targeting on,
and the accounts that are showing intent
for that topic we're running outbound campaigns to
on the regular.
And then we have a number of other kind of like trigger event
and other style campaigns that run out the door
and end up turning into leads in our system
that are technically outbound sourced.
That half of the business, if you will,
and all of that rolls up to me,
and we call that science core,
and we've been doing it that way for quite a while,
and have been frankly, what I would determine
to be very good success.
On the inbound side, we've got a variety of activities,
a lot of the kind of content marketing,
SEO being found and being very discoverable,
those are things that we've gotten reasonably good at,
and are generally generating,
call it right around 50,000 unique visitors
to our website every single month,
and then turning that into a lot of inbound interests
that we take forward into sales.
- You mentioned the persona a little bit here.
In terms of like types of organizations,
do you have like size and shape of organizations
that you're going after?
- We do, we're also lucky in the sense
that we don't have to throw a hard floor
or a hard ceiling at the type of organizations
that we work with.
I think our largest client by total revenue,
at least in the software space is Salesforce,
we've worked with Google and Microsoft
and a bunch of other very large organizations
in the past on the enterprise side,
all the way down to two guys in a garage.
And so it's not uncommon for us to have,
as long as the business model supports it,
and that's the key criteria for science really is,
when the business model can support an outbound motion,
so note what's not included there.
A lot of product led growth companies,
maybe not nearly as much of a fit or freemium tools
or B2C companies that really couldn't support
an outbound motion whatsoever.
But if the business model supports it,
our TAM tends to range that gamut
from the solar printer on up.
- Awesome.
You touched on a bunch of how sort of demand fits into that,
but any other thoughts on demand
and how it fits in digger marking strategy?
- Yeah, we've run quite a lot of what I would call
demand kind of experiments too.
We're always testing new channels,
we're always looking for ways to attract folks
or be in the buying path of a buyer
as they're looking to discover organizations like ours.
The interesting part about our business model
is that we have a very kind of non-zero sum game
type of organization and industry that we compete in.
In other words, when our clients grow,
we grow or vice versa,
and that's the main reason that we're being hired, right?
People wanna grow more,
and so our job is to both help with demand gen and lead gen
and ultimately turn interest into appointments
and appointments into sales revenue.
All right, let's get to our next segment, the playbook,
is where we open up that playbook
and you talk about the tactics that help you win.
- You play to win the game.
- Hello, you play to win the game.
You don't play to just play it.
- What are your three uncuttable budget items?
- Three uncuttable budget items.
- Ooh, that's a really good question.
I think that for us, some uncutables
are a lot of the positions that we've achieved
on primarily directories where our own clients are reviewing us
and relating their first-hand experience
of doing business with science to the rest of the world
and a lot of those directories are pay-per-click
and they very much feature folks in sponsorship tiers.
And so we have to preserve those tiers by pay-for-play
and so that becomes a budget item
that is loathe to be cut.
Largely because the truth of the matter is
that when you exist on directories
and you have positive word of mouth or favorable reviews
and our reviews tend to be very robust.
We tend to have more than average competitors in the space
simply because we've had more clients, I think,
over the years and been growing a lot faster.
But the interesting part there is that those leads
when they come through,
I like to think of it almost like Google arbitrage, right?
Because people are hitting Google
and they're finding directories
and then they're finding you one layer deep, right?
So if I were looking on Google for say,
lead generation services companies
or appointment setting firms or telemarketing services
or call centers or any of the other kind of like phrases
that largely describe our business,
there's a really good chance that I'm hitting a directory first
and seeing a stack ranking of ourselves
against relevant competition.
- Yeah.
- And again, when you can compare apples to apples,
so to speak, and then earn those click-throughs,
oftentimes through sponsorships or uncuttable budget,
what you find is that those clicks tend to convert
at a much higher rate and they tend to perform
very well in sales cycles
and it's a very virtuous circle or cycle going forward.
They also produce a lot of people that are doing their homework
and that we can then identify through our use of our own tools
and again, follow up as I was illustrating earlier
in an outbound live motion.
So capturing people that are doing research
but maybe just aren't ready to pull the trigger
and fill out that form just yet.
It's a great way to mobilize outbound,
to capitalize on buying interest,
even if the buyer themselves isn't ready to pull the trigger.
So that would be number one.
I think number two would be our own ad budget.
And so our ad budget really has performed well for us
and the ability to allocate dollars against our ICP
and return results is something that we don't see cutting
anytime in the near future.
Plus raising awareness has a ton of virtuous effects
on what we see in other traffic channels,
not the least of which are direct.
That's where we see a lot of people associating
with the science brand and then even coming back
and oftentimes doing Google searches for that science
without an S and getting branded traffic
either organically or through AdWords.
So that would be, and maybe I've been thrown AdWords in
as part of like two A or number three of uncutable budget
simply because we wanna be on that buying path
when people have buying intent
and commercial keywords that are relevant to us.
So that would be my answer.
What types of places are you all advertising?
- A lot of the very usual kind of suspects clutch,
G2, Up City, Trust Radius, Captera, Get Up,
Gartner Parry Insights, you name it,
that's just a short list that I could itemize up.
- Yeah, for sure.
Just like all of those places where you can be found
where it's high intent, like you said,
people doing research, either looking for something to buy
or potentially looking down the road and capturing that
and obviously same thing with AdWords.
I'm curious 'cause a lot of that stuff is very event heavy.
- Yes.
- And that seems very purposeful.
Is that because you're focusing so much on those
because of propensity to buy
and do you have non-intent heavy initiatives
that you're doing as well, more of market making
or category design or those things?
- I would say less, we have been very intent heavy
and that's deliberate and intentional.
- I intentionally ask you the question.
No, I'm kidding.
- But yeah, we love second party intent,
which is why as a great example,
we just started a new advertising relationship
with slash dot, source forage.
They have kind of intent products as well
where across their categories, we can see who's in market,
who's buying, who's looking for various tools
and ultimately again, run outbound campaigns
against those accounts and contacts.
- And then in terms of content,
you mentioned doing a bunch of stuff for content and SEO
and those sort of initiatives.
How are you thinking about creating that stuff
to drive demand?
Are you making stuff for people that you need to exist?
Are you making more stuff for you, more stuff for them?
How do you think about content?
- I think of it as a blend and what we try to create
is not have a narrow aperture but a wide enough aperture
to focus on content that we develop
that fits into various buckets.
You itemize the few of them, but here's a few others.
So we definitely look at commercial intent keywords
that would need content, create it around them
and that's a big focus for our editorial manager
and her kind of content calendar.
I would say the other big areas of focus,
especially for us lately, have been our evolution
and graduation, if you will, into software
and kind of even software-only sales
as well as bundled software and services sales.
And so we've created a lot of content around our new products,
how they're used, where they're used,
the categories that they belong to, understanding them.
So you can almost think of it as like a product marketing
focus for a lot of our recent blogs.
We definitely do science-centric content around news,
awards, recent appointments, that kind of stuff
that I think is still relevant to today.
And then last but not least, we spend quite an amount of time
writing about the issues and the best practices
and what we see in the field, if you will,
working on behalf of clients in the motions
that we typically do.
In fact, that's all about.
Another form of content we have is our own podcast
and we could get into that and some of what's produced there
as well.
- Yeah, let's get into it.
Don't have to twist my arm to talk podcasts, that's for sure.
- Yeah, so we run a podcast called
the Enterprise Sales Development Podcast
and the focus is really around that leader, if you will,
in the sales development space.
And that's typically the guests that we have on,
as well as consultants and authors
and other thought leaders in and around sales development,
largely for the purpose of really giving back.
I tell all of our guests, like the best thing
that we can have in our conversation
is you sharing some of your first person insights
on how you run your teams, how you go to market,
what's working for you, messaging that you've developed,
tactics that you've seen work, strategies that you want
to employ or that you are currently employing
at your company.
And then our listenership benefits by getting all
of that information, G2 and honest opinions of our guests,
which are real thought leaders.
- Yeah, I talk about this idea of co-creating
with your prospects, with your customers
and with your influencers, with your community.
And I think that it's like a no-brainer.
If you're not co-creating with your prospects
and your customers, you're absolutely losing out.
They have audiences, they have things
that they want to share.
Generally speaking, most people are not good at writing.
We're not gonna, not that they couldn't actually write.
And of course they probably could,
but that we're about it physically sitting down
and writing the article
and then editing it and then posting it.
I don't know the average number of articles people write
on their LinkedIn's or on their personal blogs or whatever.
Fast majority of people are not gonna do that stuff.
And they're definitely not gonna do it at a clip
that's fast enough to keep up with the Joneses, right?
Like a technology moves so fast, marketing moves so fast
that getting those insights like weeks in advance,
months in advance, like you can have a huge impact.
I think I challenge every company to start co-creating content
with those folks.
And like if you were to go back 15 years ago and go,
hey yeah, some of the top prospects and customers
are gonna write like guest write blog posts for us.
You'd be like, oh my gosh, how do I do it?
Show me where to sign.
That's the greatest thing ever.
And like now you can do that with a series and it's great
and you're serving your audience and your community
and it drives the bottom line.
It's win-win.
- It is win-win.
And by the way, I agree with everything you just said.
The other thing I would add to that
is if I think about the mind of our buyer
and actually on your podcast,
you probably have your entire audience,
A, they're already listening to podcasts.
They're hearing this now.
They are kind of like sharpening the saw
or working on their own craft
just by listening to this podcast.
That ambition, that kind of like professional development
if you will, I think is probably the most undersold
or undertold trend line of our generation.
- Totally. - Largely because I don't see people
climbing up the corporate ladder without it.
I don't see new ideas being developed.
I don't see promotions without people soaking up
like sponges, new ideas, new methods,
better ways of growing their own businesses
without that type of professional development.
And so if you take it all back to first principles,
this idea for feeding like the ambitions of the listeners
that wanna grow themselves is kind of a noble goal, right?
Isn't it like?
- Yeah, I agree.
I literally built a company based off of this.
So I, of course, it's what I believe in.
But yeah, I believe that practitioners,
the people who are actually like in the trenches
doing this stuff, many of the answers that we seek, right?
My friend is a marketing professor.
He had his students listening to the podcast
because where else would you get these insights?
It's not gonna be in the textbook.
They can't even write a textbook that fast, right?
And then so anyways, I think it's non-negotiable.
I think you have to be doing this stuff.
And one of the things that comes up often
with this sort of thing is like,
well, is anyone watching or listening or paying attention?
And like to me, that's the same thing as the CFO
and the CEO having the conversation saying like,
should we have to train our employees?
And the CFO says, what if we train them and they leave?
And the CEO says, what if they don't, they stay, right?
Like it's the same sort of thing.
- Oh, that quote.
- Like being worried about who is consuming and when
and how is of course like you have to think about that stuff.
And you have to make things in media that people want.
But everybody wants to get better at their jobs.
Like everybody wants to.
So you have to help them do that.
You have to figure it out.
However you do that, you need to figure it out.
If it's a trade show, if it's a magazine,
if it's a TikTok channel, and so whatever it is,
you gotta help people get better at their jobs.
- Well, and I think that the same ambitious,
smart, professionally developed folks,
there's a certain amount of halo effect that occurs
in producing what people would define as good
or quality or professional content.
Because they'll realize the brands behind that,
they'll realize the voices, they'll realize the leadership,
if you will, and they'll start to ascribe certain elements
to your brand based on that consumption.
And I think that model of marketing
is actually a really effective one.
Terrible to attribute, like literally one of the hardest
things to quantify down for all the demand gen folks
out there listening to this.
You know exactly what I'm talking about.
- Yep, oh yeah.
- 'Cause it's not linear and it's not one to one
and it's not a CTR that you can,
oh, they listen to the podcast and then they bought my product.
Doesn't work that way.
- But that's where you make a difference.
And this is one of the things that's so exciting
about this show is unlike why we do uncutable budget items.
Like the easiest thing to do is to say,
our target demo is blank whatever officer at this size
company from this number of employees to this number
of employees and run a bunch of ads on LinkedIn, right?
- Yeah.
- Anyone can do that.
Same thing with like Facebook made advertising really easy.
It's super accessible.
Google the same thing.
Now there's endless levels of complexity there
that you have to deal with.
But like that is easier to set that up
because there's like rules and you know how to do that.
Creating things from scratch is way harder.
- Way harder.
- So therefore like if you're looking for an advantage
you could build an advantage.
You could build a moat around the things that are much harder
to execute from a company perspective,
from a marketing perspective.
And that's what the best marketers are doing, right?
- Well, Rome wasn't built in a day
and I don't think that anything that's worth having
as a channel or go to market strategy ever comes easily one.
- I wanna go back to the SDR piece here.
Obviously there's two sides to this coin
which we talk about a lot on this show
which is on one side that outbound motion
is mostly essential for any type of business that does that.
On the other side it's really annoying
to the people who are getting the emails.
A lot of the time.
And so how do you think about balancing that
and how do you think about doing that in your own marketing
and obviously your organization does this
and it works on it at a time?
- I think that there's a lot of ways to peel this onion
and so I'll start on one that I've already,
maybe it can become a theme throughout this podcast
for folks to think differently,
especially on the demand chain side of the house.
If you're running inbound let outbound
or intent let outbound campaigns,
theoretically you're anything but annoying, right?
Like logically speaking, the reason that it's why me,
why now why care in any kind of multi-channel outreach
is because you have reason to believe
that the other person that you're reaching out to has a need
and those reasons can be,
I don't wanna go too far down that path
but there was a trigger event
and it wasn't just your name appeared on our list.
You know what I mean?
It was based on some action that you took
which is why my highest and best form of outbound
is really inbound let.
People don't just arrive at like science.com
because they couldn't find the summer blockbuster reading
like where's the latest Grisham novel?
Oh let's go to science.com.
No, there was something that was curious or interesting
or in our areas of promise that pulled them to our site.
Maybe it was an ad, maybe it was content,
maybe it was a referral link.
By the way, marketers out there,
you have a cost associated with that visit
and recouping that cost is actually a pretty good way
of thinking about like justifying any of those
inbound let outbound efforts.
Anyways, once somebody's on that site,
98 out of 100 people, 97 out of 100 people
are gonna hit the site, visit a page or five
and go silently.
That's what the numbers say.
What you're doing to get those people back onto the radar,
back in front of them, to me is like anything but annoying.
It's like focused attention on someone
that was showing some form of buying intent.
And so ultimately I view the annoyance factor
to be very low in those situations largely
because what you're really trying to figure out is fit.
You're trying to figure out like,
hey, what were you researching?
Hey, what were you trying to learn?
Hey, what were you comparing?
Were you interested in looking
at different vendors and we were one of them, so to speak?
And then moving in that direction.
Now for pure just like list led outbound,
I think that there's a variety of ways
that we can avoid the annoyance trap.
And so this is more like general speaking
on like outbound best practices, if you will,
file under that bucket.
And what I would say first and foremost is relevance
is king in all cold outreach, period full stop end of story.
And if you can't cross the relevance bar,
then you are going to get ignored or spam folder or deleted
because busy people just, that's what they do.
And I assume, and I think that this is a good rubric
for anyone thinking about it, any form of outbound
that the three B's are always in play in the modern era.
And those are that your prospects will always be busy,
bombarded and bewildered.
Love it.
I've yet to meet again these ambitious executives,
pick an industry, pick a, like if they're worth talking to
as part of a buying group, then they're largely by default
as a rule over schedule.
They're always busy.
- Yep.
- Just the way that it is.
It's like the sun rising in the east
and setting in the west.
And to think differently would be asinine strategically.
They're bombarded in the sense that like your outreach
will be part of all the other stimuli,
all the other people reaching out to them that day,
that hour, in that inbox or on that phone
or over whatever medium you choose on LinkedIn.
And so you have to recognize that's really your competition
or that's really the noise that you wanna be signal in.
And then last but not least, bewildered,
I like to think of this as most prospects,
buying is really hard.
Buying anything is super like difficult
if you get right down to it.
I don't know of any college courses that teach buying
to most executives.
Outclass. - Outclass.
- Outclass. - Outclass.
- Of larger companies that have procurement departments
where that is a discipline.
Buying is largely ad hoc, random,
and completely democratic
and only becoming more so over time.
So buying's hard.
The way I like to flip this around then is
once you realize that everyone's busy bombarded
and bewildered, you can adapt strategies
for adding value to that equation as an outbound practitioner
or as an SDR, reaching out and thinking through
like what's gonna make this person
that I'm reaching out to care?
To not just say yes to an appointment with me
but continue talking.
- What are some examples of that?
- I think that there's a huge body of research
that indicates that one of the big attached ideas
to relevance is personalization.
And so the idea that you don't treat people like numbers,
you don't just mass blast a message
and hope that it works.
A lot of outbound arrests on the fundamentals
of one to one outreach, doesn't it?
- Yeah, agreed.
I totally agree.
- One human to another.
At least that's the point as far as I can tell
of why even have the SDR role in the first place.
So if that's a truism about the role
and the dynamic, then like letting humans
interact with other humans and having a relevant reason
for reaching out and then conducting personalization,
research, segmentation, all the kinds of things
that you would expect to make something actionable.
Let me say it this way.
Those times where you've probably perked up,
paid attention and otherwise interacted or engaged
with whoever was reaching out to you,
were those times where you felt like,
"Oh, this doesn't look like all this other kind of stuff,
does it?"
And I think that cuts the clutter.
It's the signal and the noise.
And I've probably spent more time collectively
on the buy side given title and role and budget
that I've held than on the sell side.
And I think that this is the golden rule
that a lot of my peers, I would hope,
really start to understand when creating campaigns
or crafting them out or just thinking through the dynamic
of like that one to one interaction of SDR to prospect,
how are we making it worth the prospect's time?
- I love it.
Any other best practices that you've seen there?
I guess I should also add in,
I love your ROI calculator.
It's really cool, we'll link it up in the show notes.
It's very well done and I think it's pretty darn rad.
It has an awesome builder buy.
Do you wanna go science?
Do you wanna do it yourself?
And it's just a slick little tool.
- We tend to think in ROI terms around outbound,
any of the flavors that I talked about earlier,
you can still model out the same way.
And what's cool about outbound is it actually isn't
as victim, so to speak, of attributional uncertainty
or vagueness as other channels are.
So we still have you to have a client
that wonders where the appointment
that was set by science came from.
- Yeah, that's funny.
- So when you have that attribution,
you can run a very clean ROI calculation
against any product, service or solution
in any sales cycle, largely because you're starting
from what you hope to be a sales accepted lead,
but you know exactly where it came from
and what it cost you 'cause we're a monthly subscription fee.
You can basically just run a one to one.
Oh, okay, list many appointments led to this many kind
of sales and I can do the backwards math
and get an ROI off of it like extraordinarily cleanly.
- Yeah, I love the bill versus buy.
I just wanted to shout out that calculator that you all have.
- Yeah, thank you, appreciate it.
- What is your most cuttable budget item?
What's the stuff that you maybe won't be investing
in next year or maybe decreasing spend on something?
- One of my most cuttable budget items,
I wish I could cut and that is we pay services
to help us suppress, especially on AdWords,
bot traffic that masquerades as accurate clicks.
It's just like attacks on the industry as a whole
and I wish I never had to spend not even a dollar
on that type of software that monitors that spend
and then hands us back.
Here's the percentage of your spend that's bot traffic
and here's what you have to do to suppress these folks.
- Yeah, that's a great one.
That's a great call out but also necessary evil.
- I know, right.
- Okay, let's get to our segment, the desktop
where we talk about healthy tension,
whether that's with your board, your competitors
or anyone else.
If you had a memorable desktop in your career.
- Yes, I have.
We'll see if any of our competitors
are actually listening to this podcast.
But we actually built a site and internally,
we called it the Legion Mega, but what we did was
we basically stack ranked 83 different criteria
of lead generation companies like ourselves
against objective things that we could matrix
or put into almost a spreadsheet and we scored it.
We built the site and we put 282 of our closest competitors
into that kind of like scoring mechanism.
And lo and behold, we came out on top
and it's now a public site where it has our scores
versus all 280 plus of our competitors.
Needless to say, a few of our competitors
have issued cease and desists for us creating scores
with their brand and trademark and what have you.
So I think that would qualify as a desktop.
- That's pretty good.
I like it.
All right, let's get to our final segment here, quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Just like how quickly you can talk to somebody.
If you use qualified, go to qualified.com to learn more.
We love qualified.
They are the pipeline cloud and we love them dearly.
Go to qualified.com to learn more.
Just the best company, best team, best leaders.
Quick hits, Eric, are you ready?
- I am.
- Number one, do you have a favorite podcast or TV show
or movie or book that you've been checking out recently?
- Yeah, so the Jolt Effect is a book that I've just taken down,
recommend it to any sales leader.
But I think that marketing leaders can learn a lot
from the information, the research
and kind of the key ideas is from the same team
that wrote the Challenger books, Challenger sale,
Challenger customer, which I also highly recommend.
And so the Jolt Effect is there kind of like new and leading.
So that's one that I highly recommend.
Other podcasts for me personally,
I tend to gravitate towards a lot of the
national public radio type stuff.
I'm a huge marketplace, Kai Rizdall shout out.
Great, daily listen for me.
And I'm a big fan of the All In podcast.
I think has gained a tremendous amount of traction
and a really short amount of time.
Largely because the dynamic between the four impresarios
on that podcast is a rare thing.
- Yeah, I think that being able to react in real time
to stuff is something that is really hard to do,
to build a series where you do that consistently
and repeatable, and they're able to do that really well.
It's a huge value add.
- Yeah, I totally agree.
- What is your best piece of advice for a first time CMO?
- My best piece of advice is think of yourself
as a portfolio manager where you're by default
can have a lot of activities, resources, people,
budget to manage, and that you're never gonna get
everything 100% right.
What you need to look for is forever be optimizing.
Figure out what your key channels are,
figure out what your key activities are,
figure out what seems to be working.
So this is where data meets gut feel.
But the best portfolio managers that I've observed
are like the best CMOs, in my opinion,
largely because they can cut and they can get out
of investments that are non-productive, faster than not.
But they're always looking for what's going to return
better results and feed those winners as they happen.
So I would say be a portfolio manager.
- Considering I have a post called
portfolio-based marketing, ready to rock here,
I wholeheartedly agree I'll need a quote for that.
Happy to serve.
- You gotta run.
- Hey, now.
- So there you go.
- I know that's what I mean.
The work is done.
Eric, awesome having you on the show.
Thanks so much for joining.
For listeners, you can go to science.com,
science without the S to learn more about what they do,
and SDRs and all the fun stuff with the platform and services
and everything in between.
Eric, any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- Just that if you listened to us or heard us
on this podcast, please let our sales team or our SDRs know.
We love getting that feedback and maybe even that attribution
that'll ride in our CRM.
- Yeah, there you go.
That's awesome.
- Inform the discussion.
- Great.
Thanks again and we'll chat soon.
- Sounds good.
Thanks again.
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