Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone, this is Toni Holbein from Growblocks. You are listening to the Revenue Formula. In today's episode, we're talking about three ways how marketing gets screwed. And what you can do about it.
[00:00:12] Enjoy.
[00:00:12] Mikkel: I asked my mom, Can you take care of the kids, I text her,, she's like, yeah, maybe I'll be traveling, , I'm like, okay, cool, maybe, maybe you need a backup, and she wrote me this morning because I nudged her and I was like, hey, I mean, sure you, you'll know. soon whether you're gonna travel because this is early feb like you need to book stuff and so on and she's like yeah i don't know yet but it's uh you know it's because of my 60th birthday i'm like oh fUCK!
[00:00:44] Best son ever.
[00:00:46] Toni: You fucking asshole.
[00:00:48] Mikkel: It's the week I'm turning 60. Oh, it's just
[00:00:53] Toni: There might be a surprise for my
[00:00:55] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:00:55] Toni: so I don't know, maybe ask him. Or from my My son You're
[00:01:01] Mikkel: And we're planning a date night that week, it's just like, oh
[00:01:05] Toni: also planning a date like three months ahead
[00:01:09] Mikkel: Almost,
[00:01:10] Toni: who are you parents or
[00:01:11] Mikkel: That was because we have, uh, Christmas now and then We are doing Robin's birthday early January, and it's like, you
[00:01:20] Toni: It's like, oh, do you have time this weekend? Um,
[00:01:22] Mikkel: have
[00:01:23] Toni: weekend I have time is, uh, in, uh, week fifty fifty seven. So
[00:01:32] Mikkel: one do we want to segue into here? Do we want to segue into how Basically, my calendaring is broken or how I always always get screwed, uh, basically because of myself
[00:01:44] Toni: No, but yeah, how you get screwed. Yeah, that's going to be interesting.
[00:01:47] Mikkel: That's gonna be interesting Okay, good.
[00:01:50] Let's do that. Uh, no, so we're gonna I mean, it's actually weird We didn't listen to the intro music while doing the intro. That's so It's too late now. We're in it. It's, I mean, at least the listeners. Yeah, that's Kyle. At least the listeners, they got a, you know, a chance to listen to the intro music.
[00:02:05] so it happens ever so often that marketing gets screwed gets squeezed and there's a couple of reasons for that. I think, uh, we're going to get into at least three of the core areas today, uh, and hopefully provide insights for the folks outside of marketing. So they get a better perspective, how they should look at it, how they should deal with it.
[00:02:24] And also quite frankly, for those commercial leaders in the marketing team, for how to actually approach some of these issues,
[00:02:29] Toni: I gotta say, marketing is one of the hardest things conceptually to understand.
[00:02:35] Mikkel: understand,
[00:02:36] Toni: Right? So, I think in sales, it's kind of pretty straightforward. You take a call, they sign, done. How difficult can that be? Practically, it's super difficult, right? So this is, so, and, and maybe that's true for all the different things that we're doing, don't get me wrong, but I think especially for marketing, marketing is conceptually really difficult to grasp, right?
[00:02:57] Because you don't have the, well, they, you know, click demo request and, you know. Ad, Demoquest, done. That's not really actually how it works. Um, and, and I think that whole part of the funnel isn't really understood by many other folks further down. Sometimes I would even argue by people in marketing this really isn't really well understood.
[00:03:15] Um, and I think this is creating a bunch of, uh, a bunch of issues, right? And some of those, let's, let's get into those.
[00:03:21] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think the, so the fact is for a lot of companies who build out a strong motion with marketing. High percentage of revenue will come from marketing, will be sourced from marketing. Of course, sales will work on it and you're going to have cases where, you know, who actually landed this deal, was it outbound, inbound?
[00:03:39] And that's really the first, uh, point we're going to get into, which is all the numbers fighting that's going to happen, especially in relation to the sales and marketing and kind of, you know, claiming, you know, the deal at the end of
[00:03:50] the day.
[00:03:50] Toni: And it's, I think it's, I mean, we have this here at Growblocks sometimes, right? Which is, and it's, it's fun. It's banter. It's a little bit serious also. Um, but it's, um, I think it's important to have that conversation. I think it's important to have that conversation. It's just really also important not to kind of make it, make it go sour.
[00:04:09] And then I think, um, in some organizations that just, you know, grow very nicely and very large, and then there's pressure, I think then, then these things sometimes come to a head unless you have proper rules of engagement potentially in place, right? You know, let's, let's, let's wait with that one.
[00:04:23] Mikkel: And I think it's also just to create the very real example. We even discussed it this morning. So Anton on our team, uh, who's doing sales, had a call with a prospect, listens to this show. So shout out to you, whoever you are, and loves it. And then you go like, Oh, this is such a hot inbound.
[00:04:41] And it's like, he goes, I booked the meeting. It's like, ah, dang it. And then from the corner, someone else says actually, sorry, I actually referred that person to us. And how do you navigate that stuff? It gets so complicated and muddy, right? And that's, that's the challenge in essence, where I think what started happening is folks thought, hey, let's get attribution software.
[00:05:01] And then it will make that pain go away.
[00:05:04] Toni: Someone mentioned the word podcast and suddenly it's fully attributed to marketing
[00:05:08] Mikkel: Yeah, exactly. Give it to me.
[00:05:12] Toni: Every single call I'm on, I'm just like, I'm whispering in the beginning when, you know, Gong just started. Then I'm saying podcast.
[00:05:23] Mikkel: Um, but I think it's, it's kind of a silly thing, right? So when you look at attribution, I think the great use case is to manage your paid advertising and actually understand what is happening.
[00:05:33] With those folks you advertise towards, when it comes to, is it an inbound or outbound, it's, I'm sorry, it's just a different conversation altogether.
[00:05:40] Toni: No, it's like this, this attribution question is always, and I think a lot of people are getting this kind of wrong, um, because it's one word used for two different things. Um, one thing is who in the company is deserving credit.
[00:05:53] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:05:54] Toni: And, you know, that might be marketing sometimes, it might be outbound, it might be partner, it might be a mix, it might be all near bound, whatever, whatever is coming up these days.
[00:06:02] Um, and then there's the reason why us as managers really care about it. Um, well. If, if that one thing worked to get us a deal, how can we do more of it, right? And that usually is something that relates to things outside of the organization. And you don't really give a shit if you kind of need to pay an SDR a hundred bucks or, you know, someone else gets a pat on the shoulder.
[00:06:25] You don't really care about this, right? And when you really think about it, and it's like, well, You know, marketing does 20 things concurrently at the same time and outbound does one specific piece at the same. Does it, does it, you know, does it really matter which one of these other 20 it is? It's not like you have like a big commission fight going on.
[00:06:43] It's not about that. You just want to understand, you know, of what of the things are working and what can you do more of, right? That's, that's what the real attribution problem is actually about.
[00:06:53] Mikkel: Exactly And that's I I think it's
[00:06:56] Toni: to
[00:06:56] Mikkel: It's also to the point, you know, even if there's an outbound motion happening, wouldn't it be nice if marketing is actually supporting that motion so people maybe know you when you're dialing up, you know, Greg and saying, Hello, Greg, how's your day?
[00:07:09] I'm calling from
[00:07:10] Toni: What do you, okay, what do you think about, um, all bounds?
[00:07:14] Mikkel: I don't know enough about it.
[00:07:16] Toni: Wow. That is like the, the, the least opinionated podcast
[00:07:19] Mikkel: I've ever seen. No, but it's also like if I'm going
[00:07:22] to talk about something, I have an opinion, I need to kind of understand it.
[00:07:25] So my impression, I
[00:07:26] can tell you what my impression is.
[00:07:28] It's a mix, a blended mix of outbound and inbound. That's how I would see it, but I don't know. So I think, yes, let's move on. So I think the other thing, um, that happens when, when marketing readers get squeezed. And I think it happens in part when companies say, Hey, marketing is a revenue. That's how we're going to focus on and it needs to grow revenue fast and fast and fast and oh, we're just going to keep budgets as, as is.
[00:07:51] What happens is, uh, you start reporting on Pipeline. Even worse if you do it on Influence Pipeline,
[00:07:57] Toni: Pipeline. So, and then I think, exactly, and I think Pipeline or not, kind of, that doesn't matter. But it's this, um, I'm not sure how old it is. It feels fairly young. It feels like the last three, four years. I'm not sure, is that young?
[00:08:07] I think it's young. Uh, Influenced, Influenced Revenue, Influenced Pipeline. Um, and, and ultimately it basically kind of tries to create a new metric. Um, that doesn't, that isn't using the attribution word because that's, um, what is it? It's non binary. Oh, no, it is binary actually. Um, and it can either be this or it can be that.
[00:08:32] It can't be both. Um, and basically now, uh, people figured out, uh, well, if we just use another word. I mean, they're marketeers, so I mean, they kind of got that one right. If we use another word called influenced, then we can say to the sales guys, well, the attribution is on sales,
[00:08:49] Mikkel: sales,
[00:08:50] Toni: at the same time, it's also
[00:08:52] Mikkel: We help you.
[00:08:53] We deserve
[00:08:53] Toni: Influenced for us, right. And it's kind of, it's basically kind of creating another mess at
[00:08:58] Mikkel: know what we did? We ran ads towards every single open up before they became a customer
[00:09:03] Toni: and I mean, they. We can clearly see they were on the website. Yeah, . So and also the deck that they saw, there was one slide in there that came from marketing. So it's marketing influence now. So
[00:09:15] Mikkel: think the problem here is, of course, it's a thing you want to go and influence the pipeline and logically it makes sense. But I think the process many folks take. It's not that scientific. It's not like they're going to say, Hey, now we're going to split for the next two quarters.
[00:09:27] We're going to split every single open up. Some, we're going to attempt to influence the others. We're just going to leave by themselves. And then we're going to see whether that cohort is going to perform better because we hit them with case studies, with videos, with whatever. And I think most agents go like, yeah, we should totally nurture those deals and help sales and then do that.
[00:09:44] Right. Um, and I think there is, there has to be some method to
[00:09:47] Toni: madness.
[00:09:48] Mikkel: At the end of the day, what counts is revenue. Not whether you invent something,
[00:09:53] Toni: So, and some BigCo guy out there will tell you BigCo, let's just say a thousand people plus or even 500 people plus, um, will probably say like, well, but Mikkel, um, If your head is on the chopping block and you need to deliver results, um, What are you gonna do?
[00:10:11] Are you gonna spend all your time on the results that you're being targeted at? Or you're going to start doing stuff that is nice.
[00:10:21] Mikkel: probably
[00:10:22] Toni: right thing for the company, you know, helping deals go along. Um, but no one is measuring on that and no one gives a shit. I
[00:10:32] Mikkel: I mean, it's the classic saying, you know, tell me how I measure it and I'll tell you how I'll behave.
[00:10:36] That's, that's at the end of the day it. And I totally get the fact that marketing has other duties that they need to carry out that might not influence, let's say, new biz revenue. There's also the forgotten child CES you need to do, and there's going to be product release. But at the end of the day, you're going to have some basic numbers that you need to hit first and foremost.
[00:10:57] And honestly, the rest kind of has to wait. If, if the CEO, CRO says, Hey, can you, uh, we need to name all the meeting rooms and design them. Can your team do that? If I'm struggling to make the numbers, I'm probably gonna say. No,
[00:11:13] Toni: But, but I think this is what some people need to wake up to is that, and this is very, it feels very unique to marketing actually.
[00:11:21] By default, marketing also is an internal service organization.
[00:11:24] Mikkel: Yeah, it is.
[00:11:26] Toni: And, and people don't actually realize that it's like, Oh no, well, you know, you do the website so you can do, you know, the meeting room or whatever. Um, but it really is, you know, on the one hand side, you have a aggressive, offensive, uh, outward facing role for marketing, uh, with clear KPIs and ROI and all of that conversation.
[00:11:46] And then for whatever reason, and maybe this is just, you know, because of how marketing used to be 20 years ago, um, also has all the other random. , colors and fonts and, um, Christmas decoration and Christmas card tasks, basically, that actually detract from that. Right. And you could say. you know, if you, if you want to have a hold on it, because I don't think, I don't think you can completely cut it away.
[00:12:13] I think you just need to manage it much better and clearly, and kind of need to be aware that parts of that are helping and parts of that are not helping, or they're helping in different ways. Let's just say it like that. And then basically kind of have a, um, and I think the Christmas card, that's kind of a bit, you know, pushing it, but you know, uh, working on the sales tech, if you don't have a dedicated pro marketing.
[00:12:33] Uh, you know, person or enablement person doing it, or working on some other things that can help sales or can help CS that just needs to be boxed. Um, and then you need to have a conversation every quarter, if this is still the right size. And if the size should be increased or not, kind of, that's then, that's then part of the conversation.
[00:12:50] And if you're really strategic about it, you could even, as a marketer, say like, well, well, well, this can't be an MCAC anymore. This can't be a marketing customer acquisition cost anymore. This actually needs to go somewhere else. This either needs to go under enablement and sales. And be attributed to that, um, or it needs to be even in cogs for CS.
[00:13:10] Um, and basically kind of, this is, this is, I think where, um, um, where some of this influence pipeline BS, um, might actually be, you know, better managed by, by really kind of separating marketing into an internal. A service organization and an external, you know, revenue generating organization.
[00:13:28] Mikkel: are almost transitioning to the second point here, we should just hop into. And that is really that marketing becomes the everything store. So to your point, it is an internal service organization. I've helped with employer branding. Um, anything office, vibe, you know, design, meeting room names, all that jazz we've done.
[00:13:49] Christmas cards we've done, help with sending that stuff out. There's a ton of support happening. And Then you get to the marketing tactics, you know, if, if you're a revenue leader in marketing and you interview, you probably know this picture of yeah, we want you to come and do paid advertising. We also need you to build up the blog.
[00:14:06] We also need you to, we actually need to do social because there's this guy over here who's doing a great job. We want to end up like that person. And then, oh yeah, email marketing is also the, oh, and there's conferences and events and then the website, you know, you end up with already there a laundry list of a bazillion items. At the end of the day, to your point, you need to, you know, boil it down to what are the outcomes you as a business need to drive. And if, if it's helping reduce the sales cycle length, there are things marketing can do to support there. If it's improving the win rates, there are things marketing can do to support there, right?
[00:14:37] And I think that's how you need to be looking at it. Not just can we increase the inbounds as one source, but can you also help with the efficiencies? And then there are some practicalities to your point with how do you manage the costs and all that stuff, right?
[00:14:49] Toni: So, and, and kind of to your point, there was, there was some research done from HubSpot, which is a little bit dated now, it feels, from 23 or like 4 23, right?
[00:14:59] 2023. Yeah.
[00:15:00] Mikkel: state of marketing.
[00:15:01] Toni: Um, so it's not that dated, but apparently, and I still call BS on this, by the way,
[00:15:06] Mikkel: Apparently, what
[00:15:10] Toni: it? An average marketing headcount is spending six out of what? Eight? Maybe? Hours a day on manual admin and operational tasks. I mean, I'm talking about a marketing operations person.
[00:15:27] We're talking about the average marketing headcount. I think that's super weird. I think there's, you know, obviously you can. He's, for example, putting a blog online. That's like an operational admin task, not writing it, I would say, but kind of doing that. So it's, it's a little bit, it's a little bit hard to say, right.
[00:15:45] And I kind of asked you to dig into it and, and, and you failed. I heard
[00:15:48] Mikkel: failed, I
[00:15:48] heard. Yeah, I couldn't find, there were
[00:15:49] Toni: was nothing to,
[00:15:50] Mikkel: How many, how many,
[00:15:51] Toni: concrete, there was nothing to dig there.
[00:15:53] Mikkel: me how big the sample is. Tell me what you asked. And I couldn't find any of it. So I think we can agree we can call BS because if.
[00:16:00] Marketing teams spend that amount of time on operational stuff, no way they're going to grow their business. They're all going to get, you
[00:16:06] know,
[00:16:06] Toni: are they?
[00:16:07] Mikkel: Well, I don't know. I haven't asked them,
[00:16:09] Toni: But the, I think the conversation we had around that stat, which I think was really interesting actually, um, let's just say that's true. Let's just believe HubSpot. I mean, they would never write anything that's not true.
[00:16:20] Um, uh, so let's just say that's true. Um, I think one, one interesting angle to think about here is, and you just mentioned, it's kind of, yes, we have the service part that's boring. And then we have the offensive part, um, which is, you know, the website, the blog, social ads, events, and the list goes on and on and on.
[00:16:42] I think. At least this is kind of my perspective on this. I think, um, we as CROs, we as CEOs, we as whatever, we kind of go into this marketing thing and then we say like, Hey, here are all the channels. All of them have like a little marketing label on them. And now I need you to play on all of them. Um, and obviously the team is understaffed, it's under resourced, kind of, that's the, the, that's obviously always the case.
[00:17:05] and what then is going to happen, right? Because you need to kind of get this checkmark, hey, you know, blog is up, you know, podcasts is out, you know, social media posts is out. People are, I mean, fairly straightforward, it's like, well, I need to kind of get the checkmark
[00:17:18] Mikkel: Yeah, exactly.
[00:17:19] Toni: and that suddenly consumes, what is that 80 percent of the day, if not more, that's what it, but that's what's consumed.
[00:17:25] So the emails went out, you know, I, you know, the, the newsletters out. And then because the, the other part, the creative part is not so clearly defined, right? There's no green or. Whatever, checkmark behind, Oh, this was creative. Um, and, and what that happens because the other stuff is so tangible. Everyone is focusing on that stuff and then pushing out really boring content, really boring stuff that's being pushed out.
[00:17:51] And then it's like, well, you know, I can't blame you for this creative piece, kind of not, you know, lifting. And then the, the, the, the point, if you then kind of go back, it's like, well, yes, we are on social, we are on email. We aren't doing, we're doing all of these things, but none is really actually working out.
[00:18:06] it's probably because everything is just an operational admin BS
[00:18:10] Mikkel: it's become a volume game, just like with the number of leads, the number of, you know, posts and emails and whatnot you can do.
[00:18:17] It's become a numbers game and back to the check mark, right? I think what's been forgotten is the quality of the content and insight you're producing, right? And if you're a CRO, I would heavily advise you to consider how many folks do you have creating content in the marketing team? Actually read that stuff.
[00:18:33] Listen to, you know, watch the social stuff and ask yourself, is there a strong point of view in there? Are there net new insights to the market? Or are we just creating, you know, Oh, it used to be people share 10 best practices for X and we did 12,
[00:18:46] Toni: So I gotta say, I gotta say, it is a volume game and should always stay a volume game. I hate this. So when, when I was kind of scaling out the the outbound team or whatever kind of we were doing. I was like, we need more opportunities. Um, and then someone was like, well, you can have more opportunities with worse quality.
[00:19:05] I'm just like, no, F that. No, I want to have the same quality, but I want to have more opportunities. And now, and I think it's okay to have that conversation. I think it is okay to ask some questions in. That comparable realm of like, would more dials lead to more meetings? I think it's a fair question to ask.
[00:19:24] And if someone says like, Oh no, this isn't numbers. Yes, it is a numbers game. Exactly right. so now I think on the marketing side, it's the same thing, actually. Yes, it is a numbers game, but just as you can't just have a rush through sales call and kind of, you know, say BS on the call. You need to have, uh, you know, ideally many emails and many cadences, many touch points on the marketing side, but the, the payload, what's being delivered needs to be awesome.
[00:19:51] Otherwise it's not going to stand out. I mean, nothing is standing out anywhere anymore. So it needs to be like really high up the chain.
[00:19:57] then the thing is, if, uh, you only have two hours to do that, then you, as a, as a leader of that team, you need to kind of realize, okay, wait a minute. So if I want them to create better quality content.
[00:20:09] I do have to give them more time to do it. And that means either I need to increase the team. No one is going to, Oh, Toni, great idea. Let's increase the team. Um, or you need to just cut some of the stuff away that they're doing right now. And those will be difficult things to cut away. Kind of, you know, does the email list work?
[00:20:27] Do we want to keep doing that? Maybe you're going to table this, maybe it's just a month, once a month, instead of, you know, once a week or, and, and there might be so many other examples here. That you maybe, uh, need to consider in order to get the quality of the stuff up, um, versus trying to get more quantity.
[00:20:41] Mikkel: Yeah, and I think the other challenge sometimes becomes With all those things you need to do You rarely enable decision making at the floor for the frontline team, right?
[00:20:52] And you end up with this broad team that needs to reach consensus, which is a terrible thing in a marketing realm because then it becomes average at the end of the day, right? So there's this saying from, I think it's Amazon, they have the, the team needs to be able to share a pizza, right? And I think when you look at just our marketing team here at Growblocks, we get a lot of stuff actually shipped.
[00:21:11] We only do like three channels. It's this show, it's LinkedIn. And it's newsletters. That's it. That's all we do. We don't really do that much blog content and all the other things we could pick up. That's it. That's what we're going really deep on and betting on. And it means that we, you know, produce high volume for the size of team we are.
[00:21:31] And I believe from what I've heard, also strong insights, right? And I think that's where, you know, you
[00:21:38] Toni: Padding
[00:21:38] Mikkel: Paddinger or this,
[00:21:40] Toni: Well done,
[00:21:40] Mikkel: no, but I think it's just to say I've run those bigger teams. I wish I had experienced what I've experienced here to say, well, actually,
[00:21:49] If we have a content team of seven people, I'm going to break it right down the middle and have them, you know, give them the power to make the decisions and go create, uh, and make the decisions necessary.
[00:21:59] And then you can take feedback after the fact.
[00:22:01] Toni: I think, I think they're kind of, you have two problems here. One is, you know, our team is super small. and I think we did take, we, we didn't just come up with this stuff. I think we did take some inspiration from actually Chris Walker, how he's been kind of producing content and from Dave Gerhardt, uh, how he's been thinking about kind of the founder brand and stuff.
[00:22:18] So there are a couple of things where. we have kind of really cool, strong pieces of content and then they're able to break them apart and kind of, uh, you know, distribute them in different ways. Um, I think there's one thing, and then I think on the, on the other side, let's just say you have a bigger team.
[00:22:32] the, the problem that I usually see there, it's, um, It has to be an orchestra, that kind of these things need to play together, not just at the same time. I think it's a great saying. Um, and in order for that to work out, you need to have a very clear direction, kind of where everyone needs to, you know, play towards, I guess.
[00:22:49] Um, and, uh, and that then helps them to optimize for that direction, right? If the direction isn't clear, you will have everyone doing kind of all kinds of different things that at the end of the don't target the same ICP or kind of what you wanted to do. Don't create this, Oh, wow, they're fucking everywhere kind of feeling kind of.
[00:23:08] And then you end up with a lot of kilojoules spent, but with very little stuff coming out.
[00:23:12] Mikkel: I think that's on how you structure the team and how you operate
[00:23:15] at the day, right? So you can have teams and you can say hey, these are the Outcomes we're gunning for. We need to help reduce the sales cycle length. We need to lift the amount of inbounds by X, right? And here's how we're going to orchestrate it across the teams and marketing. Right? So I think that's, that's a managerial exercise at the end of the day.
[00:23:33] I think to bottom line it. You need to make sure it doesn't become a sausage factory and you need to make sure you focus on the things that actually move the needle for the business and don't drop those and if there's a lot of noise from employer branding and CS also needs some help, not saying they're not important, you can do favors, but you need to make sure that you focus on the outcomes you
[00:23:52] Toni: you need.
[00:23:52] It's, I mean, so another example, which might resonate better with folks. So, um, in many, many organizations, you have design being part of product and engineering.
[00:24:01] Mikkel: terrible. Hate that.
[00:24:02] Toni: So for marketing specifically, yes. But, you know, those product guys, those product managers, they're managing the resources of the design team like crazy.
[00:24:12] It's like, well, their main 95 percent purpose is to build the product, right? Yes. Yes. You can have them, you know, once in a while. Um, and, oh, time's up.
[00:24:21] Mikkel: Yeah, exactly. And,
[00:24:24] Toni: uh, that's the same way I think marketing leaders should manage their marketing team. You know, when they're lending them out to other people and if there's numbers, number creeps up, you know, uh, past a certain point, I think they need to, you know, there needs to be a conversation about that.
[00:24:38] Mikkel: Yeah, exactly. So, let's move to the last piece, the last problem, uh, short termism.
[00:24:45] It's definitely a thing, uh, I've also seen. There's this, um, quarter where you're a bit behind, maybe it just started, and you look to market and go, hey, we need you to, like, crank out.
[00:24:56] I need more inbounds now. There are only so many short term tricks you can do to land those inbounds. Sure, there are some, but they're rarely enough to get you where you're being asked to. And I think what a lot of folks forget is the velocity in marketing. It's just way longer. One thing is you have velocity on opportunities, but you also have it on leads.
[00:25:16] And I think what's actually lacking for a lot of teams out there is, Instrumentation to understand that side of the business. How, how does marketing hang together in the funnel? I think there's very little understanding of that
[00:25:29] Toni: that. Yeah, no, I agree. Uh, if there just was tooling for that to be figured out here at Growblocks. I don't know. No, but I think the point is, and this goes a little bit back to, conceptionally is really hard for people to.
[00:25:42] Understand how the whole marketing realm actually works. because everyone, everyone that you talk to is like, it's simple. You put an ad on Google and then they click it and then I close it. it. So, and then, you know, the, the question that I probably got the most from salespeople, you know, sometimes on leaders, they were educated, but salespeople, Toni, can't you just spend more on ads?
[00:26:06] Just spend more money on ads, Toni. It should be simple, right? Um, and, and it's not that simple, right? If it was that simple, I think, you know, I don't know, things, things would be easier, I guess, but it's, um, um, and it's, you know, people sometimes see it as a budget constraint, but it's not, it has nothing to do with that, actually.
[00:26:24] It's kind of, you know, there's so many other things to consider. And ultimately the Google ads play, that has a super fast velocity. Right? It
[00:26:32] Mikkel: It does. If it's up and running. If it, if it is at zero
[00:26:35] and then
[00:26:36] Toni: I know. But, but still, right? Kind of the idea of I have Google ads running, let's just crack it up. You know, more, more stuff coming through that, that makes intuitive sense.
[00:26:45] And it's not completely bogus. Because basically like, okay, you are talking to people that basically already are far down the decision making tree and now they're just inbounding. And yes, you know, they might go with you. They might go with a competitor, but they'll buy something, right? Super, super far down.
[00:27:02] The thing is the amount of those people. being there, like thinking about your niche SaaS product, it's very small,
[00:27:09] Mikkel: small.
[00:27:10] Toni: it's very small and no amount of ads will increase, you know, on Google will increase that amount. So you know, you have a hundred people, uh, coming, you know, searching for whatever you do, you bid on it and you're already showing up in all of those searches.
[00:27:26] And tomorrow you have a revenue gap and you want to, Hey, you know, Google ads sounds great. Let's do more of that. but it's still only a hundred people, you know, that show up and you are still only showing it to all of them, not to all of their friends or whatever. So, you know, how is there more money going to come out of this?
[00:27:43] Right? So this is, this is then capped, right? And all the other stuff, literally in marketing, there are a couple of other plays, but all the other stuff basically talks way more about how can you get, you know, how can you increase this amount of 100 people looking for your software, uh, every week, every month, every year, whatever it might be.
[00:28:00] That's what all of this is about. But once you then go up and this is go up one funnel step, suddenly you might be looking at, wow, this is six months out, 12 months out, you know, when from, from them being educated. To them, running to the problem, going on Google, searching, and going with your competitor.
[00:28:21] Mikkel: competitor.
[00:28:21] So
[00:28:21] Toni: So that's, that's the problem.
[00:28:23] Mikkel: I think it's also funny, you, uh, so you and I, we talked a bit about, uh, basically the biggest company in Europe. Novo Nordisk, so a pharma company. And, uh
[00:28:32] Toni: do the, the, the fat drug.
[00:28:34] Mikkel: and, uh, Yeah,
[00:28:35] fat The fat drug?
[00:28:37] Okay, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, so, so, the thing is, their patents They run, they expire in, let's say, five years or something like this,
[00:28:46] Toni: it's like in nine years from now.
[00:28:48] Mikkel: years from now, right? So what's really important to that business is that they have a pipeline of new product that can replace it, right? And come into the market. I think what's missing quite often from the conversation when you look at marketing is Next year this is how we want the business to look.
[00:29:04] That requires us to start experimenting now with developing some new channels and some of them are gonna fail but we need to do that in order to support and sustain our growth rate because sure if if we sit every quarter and just crank up Google a little bit more at some point it's just The unit economics aren't going to work.
[00:29:22] They're going to break, right? So you do need new elements in play. And I think this is where a lot of folks, they forget that it's going to take you 6 to 12 months to build up a new channel. And then you need to add velocity. You're looking at a pretty long timeline, my friend.
[00:29:35] Toni: So think about it like this, right? There's, um, you have your sales cycle, maybe it's a six month sales cycle, and then you kind of have the other cycle that sits before that, which, and it's not like SQL to opportunity, that's not the cycle we're talking about.
[00:29:49] It's the cycle for someone. You know, going from a neutral state to becoming an SQL basically, right. That's, and, and that, you know, there's some research around this. Some, some folks down the street kind of did some good work here. Dream, dream data. And it's like, what was it like 180 days or something like this?
[00:30:05] Um, from, from. Uh, Oh, I'm Mikkel too. Oh, I need to buy this. Right. A hundred, like half a year, So looking at 12 months out, right. So everything you start today, um, basically with those sales cycles really helps you for Q4 next year, but that's it. And maybe, maybe then for, for the year after.
[00:30:25] Right. And that's why your, your analogy here to Novo Nordisk is so apt, right. Hey, these guys need to think about, um, you know, nine years from now there's, uh, I think they call it a patent cliff.
[00:30:34] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:30:35] Toni: literally what they call it. And, and basically now they need to now figure out, you know, what are the things we're going to do.
[00:30:42] In order to get the next blockbuster out, you know, before that actually happens. Right. Kind of what, who's going to bridge this thing. and you as marketer need to kind of think the same way about this. Right. Kind of all the stuff you want to do now for next year, guess what? It's already too late.
[00:30:57] Sorry. It's already too late. And, um, uh, and, and your managers need to understand that as well. I think that's, that's usually the problem. It's not the marketeers who don't get it. It's usually the managers.
[00:31:07] Mikkel: I think it's in how you communicate it, right? And I think that's where you need to have a more data driven approach to actually showcase this is the amount of time we're looking at.
[00:31:15] This is where we, you know, there's a channel cliff, we could call it, right? We, we're going to exhaust the channels and
[00:31:21] at this, this point in time. It's not how it works.
[00:31:23] Toni: Well done though.
[00:31:25] Mikkel: you need to, you need to have the approach to actually convey that story in the right way, because if you just anecdotally say, well, it's going to take, I heard Mikkel and Toni talk about this.
[00:31:35] It's going to take six months to build up the channel. And then historically it's going to be 12 months from that to then, you know, deal won, maybe look at your data and take that approach.
[00:31:43] Toni: approach. Yeah. Or send that podcast clip to them.
[00:31:49] Maybe it helps. No, but there's, so this, this short termism is, so that, I think it's, I think it's a real problem, but it's also so difficult as a CRO CEO to kind of manage through that because it also does feel like an excuse. It's like, ah, okay, yeah, I see, you can't do anything for it. So it's because it's not so tangible, because it's so elusive, it does very often sound like an excuse.
[00:32:12] And when you hear this as a, as a, as a leader, you want to kind of pull your hair out. And it's like, it's, it's a difficult conversation and balance to find, I feel.
[00:32:19] Mikkel: I think so. And by the way, this is not a way to justify not hopping in. You know, to the fray with the other teams, when, uh, when things go sour, you still have things you can do there.
[00:32:30] Toni: there. So just to kind of wrap it up, we talked about, um, how marketing gets screwed all the time.
[00:32:36] Um, it's not only an attribution or influence pipeline kind of problem. It's kind of much broader than that. We looked into what. Marketing is doing that is actually not marketing and everything else. And how you maybe need to kind of balance that out a little bit and maybe have that approach, looking at your marketing team, thinking like, Hey, they're doing lots of stuff internally that maybe isn't helping us.
[00:32:56] And then lastly, really almost everything in marketing. Takes a whole bunch of time. So, you know, thinking that you will have a short term impact immediately, I think that's just simply wrong. And going about what you're doing in marketing and how you're building it with a bit more timeframe, like we're talking six or 12 months, it's really hurtful to think about it like this.
[00:33:16] It's really key in order to kind of to get it right. It's
[00:33:19] Mikkel: thing now is we have this on tape. Yeah, it's a good, we have this on tape. So a couple of years from now, if we hit a
[00:33:26] Toni: Good that you started
[00:33:27] Mikkel: quarter and you're gonna, and you're going to say, Mikkel, I need some inbounds now. I'm just going to send you the link to the episode.
[00:33:34] I'm just going to send it to you. Thank you so much, Toni.
[00:33:37] Toni: you, Mikkel. Thank you everyone else for listening. Have a good one. Bye bye.