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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:21)
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Demand Geniuses. I'm gonna get straight into it now and introduce my guest, which today is Chuck Moxley. first of all, Chuck, hello, thank you for joining.
Chuck Moxley (00:31)
Hey Tom, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Tom Rudnai (00:34)
No, good to see you again. I guess before we get into it, loads of questions to ask. Maybe do want to just give us a little bit of an introduction into kind of who Chuck Moxley is and your background?
Chuck Moxley (00:45)
Sure, so I'm a fractional CMO. My background, I spent the first 10 years of my career in the agency world mostly on consumer brands and then the last 20 or so in the B2B world and heavily in SaaS. So was CMO at six SaaS companies and one B2B company and then jumped off in October of last year and became a fractional CMO and I've been doing that ever since and working with some great brands and having a blast.
Tom Rudnai (01:12)
Nice and the phrasing there jumped off makes it sound a little bit like you jumped off a cliff like how's the transition been to fractional?
Chuck Moxley (01:20)
You know, it is a bit of a jump, right? When you go, there's a couple of big changes. One is the obvious thing, you don't get a paycheck anymore. You now have to go, you know, hunt your own food basically. And you lose your benefits and you got to go, you know, set up a company and do all that kind of stuff. so there's the running your own company and doing all the new business stuff. the other interesting part is not being full time with any one brand. You know, you're so used to when you're
Cmo of a company you get so embedded in that company and and you attend all the meetings and all the other stuff that When you become fractional you narrow your scope and really focus on the high-value stuff But you've also got a code switch or not code switch
context switch between brands and categories and all of that. that just, it's just a different discipline, but it's actually been a blast. I've had a great time and learning a ton and getting to work with some new verticals that I've never worked in. So it's great.
Tom Rudnai (02:16)
Yeah, I mean, I definitely feel you on the sharp transition and the loss of security. mean, it's the same when you start a business. I decided to take out a mortgage and buy a flat two months before quitting my job and starting a business, which is like, okay, how to make a stressful thing twice as stressful. No, that's not in the playbook.
Chuck Moxley (02:33)
Yeah, that's not in the recommended plan.
Tom Rudnai (02:36)
But then so it sounds like fun transition and for you describing it must be quite interesting. Like do you enjoy the variety of working across all of those different companies rather than one? And do feel like it makes you a better marketer?
Chuck Moxley (02:50)
You know, I do enjoy it and I'm with the philosophy, by the way, you know, whatever you're doing, enjoy it, right? So, so not to say this is, you that I couldn't go back to say a full time role at some point if that were, know, where my path took me. But I
I enjoy, you know, there's a lot of things I enjoy about it. I enjoy the fact that I'm not working on the same thing every day, that I'm getting to understand different audiences and dealing with different verticals, which is new for me, which is very interesting. And being able to contrast to like SAS, which is, you know, I've done so much SAS, it's kind of fun to kind of branch out.
Tom Rudnai (03:21)
All
you just get a steady drip of meaty problems to get stuck into, right, which I think is always a pretty nice way to live. I wanted to ask you actually, so normally I'm very keen that we don't make this podcast an advert for anyone else or anyone else, but I do want to ask you about a couple of the fractional roles that you've taken on because I think they're really interesting. The first one is at Fractional, right?
Chuck Moxley (03:33)
Yep.
Sure.
Tom Rudnai (03:45)
super interesting and I want to get your take a little bit just on the fractional model as a whole right like first of all Jonah just give us a bit of a context on what what they do
Chuck Moxley (03:54)
Yeah, so let's first define fractional and it's becoming, and I wrote a post on this right after I started, because I used to think when I saw people go put fractional CMO on their LinkedIn, and again, I fessed up to this on LinkedIn that I thought that I used to think, that just means I can't find a job.
Once I became a fractional, again, I did not know a lot about it until I jumped in and then I actually went through an accelerator, another accelerator called CMOX, that basically taught me the whole methodology, it was a six month program that really gets you grounded and launched. And that's where Fractional comes in. So there's organizations out there that will help you in lining up new clients, that help guide you on the fractional space, et cetera. But the concept of fractional is basically, I'm taking my expertise and I'm
instead of taking it full time to a company, I take it part time to multiple companies. The benefit to the company is, especially earlier stage companies that can't really, wouldn't be able to.
hire a senior CMO or senior and fractionals are not limited CMO, fractional CFO, fractional whatever. They want somebody who's very senior that they simply can't afford or they can't justify at where they are. So it's a great opportunity to bring in somebody senior because the senior people can get stuff done faster, understand the strategy and drive it. So even if there's a team in place, sometimes I'll come in a company where there's more of a junior team and the frustration is
is the CEO's spending money on marketing. They're doing a lot of things on marketing, but they're not getting, it's not driving pipeline. It's not driving the things that the CEO cares about. And so I can come in, analyze, and provide the direction to start to redirect those resources and the team in a way that.
A junior person with 10 years or five years of experience just can't do. It's just because I've done this six times. I've seen the playbooks. I've got the stuff that works. I've got the bench of resources, et cetera. So I can accelerate people much faster, and they don't have to pay my full boat.
Tom Rudnai (05:43)
Yeah.
Chuck Moxley (05:53)
you know, that they would otherwise have to pay for me as a full-time employee. They're not having to give stock options, they're not having to do a lot of those things that you typically do in the SaaS world. And then what I do is I really focus on solving big problems, right?
But what I'm seeing is amazing uptake. Once a company hires a fractional
and they see the value of it, they start filling it with a lot of other fractionals. I've seen that repeatedly happen. So I think it's a new model. It's not well understood by a lot of CEOs out there. But once they've tested the waters and seen that it can work, they start to realize for a fraction of what I would pay for or for what I'd pay for one full body, I can get two or three fractionals and senior people and really build out a senior team. And often at a time that they can't afford to do it otherwise.
Tom Rudnai (06:13)
Thank
Yeah, well, it's always been a model that I want to use heavily for.
Demand genius, it lowers the barrier to entry for high quality expertise and leadership. I think there's two classic mistakes that a lot of startups make. One is early on you hire out this expensive VP layer, you have a load of people who like wanna do strategy, but don't actually wanna do anything anymore and that's the classic issue. You've also got the much more chaotic approach where you hire the junior layer, you've got loads of doers and it's just chaos, they're all running into each other and there's no actual clear plan.
plan, to me the happy medium is you hire the VP layer via high-end fractionals, you can over time adjust the level of involvement you need from those people and also get a bit of a try before you buy often on someone that you're to hire full-time in-house and they can direct the...
the more junior employees. So it feels like a very natural approach for a startup to take that trends the balance between the two classic errors. What do you see in terms of like when the fractional model drives the best outcomes in terms of the stage that is the right time to go that route and what you need back from the startup in order for you to do your job? Like is it once there's a team, is it before there's a team?
Chuck Moxley (07:50)
Yeah, I think you can work in a number of different areas and I have I have now worked with now I've been doing this about 10 months. I've worked it with all stages, so I've worked with pre revenue pre launch companies where they need that that sort of senior leadership in a very targeted way. The challenge for that is you've got to have the you gotta have some budget right, especially when it comes to marketing, because I can't do a lot without budget, right? There's you gotta spend a little bit on marketing just to.
to get stuff done, right? Me by myself as a solo marketer and the only thing is probably not a good investment, right? So, but when that company has some funding, we're starting to work with a lot more of those early stage companies. The next phase is kind of that where they've been around for three to five years. In the SaaS world, maybe they're at a three million to 10 million range and they've built out that junior team.
They went ahead, they brought in like a director of marketing or a marketing manager. They've got a couple of people now. And again, they're getting that frustration. The sales team, they've expanded their sales team because they tend to be very sales driven, especially if it's a sales led model. They've built out their sales team. The sales team is getting frustrated. They're not getting qualified leads or qualified prospects to go call on. They're still doing a ton of cold calling, but they're spending money on marketing. That's where I can come in, analyze what's going on and put structure in place. That's when I was coming in full time, that was almost always where I was coming in.
coming in with a company that had been around for a period of time, they may have had a junior marketing team and they realized they were ready to scale up and they just didn't have the expertise to do that. And then the third thing that I have now recently started working with a client is a client that's much larger but for whatever reason didn't have marketing. So the company I'm now working with is multiples of the size I've worked with before but in a different vertical and they just didn't have any kind of marketing base at all. So I'm still building everything from the ground up.
but they're a company that can afford to invest in marketing. They're ready to really scale. And the way I discussed it with them when I came in was, look, I'll come in for, I don't know, six months, a year, year and a half. When you guys are at the right point, I'll help you find the right, when you're ready to hire a full-time CMO. And by then we will have built out a team underneath, right? So I'll be leading that team. We'll build out the team. We'll build out the structure. We'll build out the tech. We'll build out all the strategies. We'll get you rocking and rolling on the marketing. And then when you're ready to hire that full-time person.
I can help you find that person, transition, and you have a very smooth transition. And that appealed to them. Because they weren't ready, because they hadn't done marketing to any great level, they were ready to go all in on a full-time CMO, and then the CMO's got a higher team, and suddenly you're spending millions out of the gate. It's a much easier way for them to see how it works, put in place what they need to put in place, do it in a stepped approach that makes sense for them.
Tom Rudnai (10:22)
it.
Chuck Moxley (10:35)
So I don't know that there's any one model that is right or wrong. I think it can work. It really depends on where the company is in growth, what they've got in terms of team, and especially if they have a whole. Sometimes they'll have somebody, they had somebody who more of a marketing person, maybe even a more senior person, they leave if they're open to the idea of fractional versus full-time. It's just a mindset switch. They have to get out of that idea of I've gotta have a full-time person dedicated. But when they do that,
It opens up the world. think you summarized it beautifully of the two mistakes that a lot of companies make and starting up because I came in a company once where they hired amazing senior team hired a brand new senior team. They're ready to scale up and we can all come in and go awesome. Here's what we need to do it. yeah no we don't have the money now to do the stuff you actually need to do. We put all the money in you guys and it's like probably not the smartest move.
Tom Rudnai (11:25)
Yeah, and then you're trying to coax these like VPs into doing stuff that they just don't want to do and you went yeah, I think it's a recipe for disaster. It comes back to what you said you were like at first like let's define what a fractional is and I think you just hit the nail on the head a little bit though which is like the flexibility of it because there is no right answer. To me that's the difference between a fractional and an agency or a freelancer right? A freelancer comes in with a process or a playbook that they have built
Chuck Moxley (11:32)
Exactly.
Tom Rudnai (11:52)
in a way that is productized and they can repeat. it's by almost by definition, right? It's the it's narrow in its scope. It's okay. You're a startup in this situation. You're at five million needs to get to 10 million. So you need to do this. I've been on that journey before. Here's the playbook for what I'm going to do and implement for you. And it's going to be super efficient. A fractionalism is a more senior, more flexible thing that comes in engages with your problems and builds a model around their own time based on what you need to give you access to that. That's how I
Chuck Moxley (12:21)
Right.
Yeah, yeah, that's not that's not bad. And we're not locked into playbooks, but we bring playbooks. the difference is once you've done this so many times, you start to see the patterns. You know how it works. Now you can adapt that to any company. So I have templates. I have playbooks that I start with, but I absolutely have to adapt it, especially as I start to grow into some other categories. Some things work, some things don't.
Tom Rudnai (12:22)
Man, is that a fair summary, would you say?
Chuck Moxley (12:47)
I can have that flexibility. I can go in and understand it, but the core tenets of what I'm good at work for any company. So it's not like I'm starting from scratch, but I'm also not locked into we have one playbook, we do this one thing and have a fixed way of doing it because each company is going to need, and they're gonna be a little bit different stage and they're gonna have different assets and different team and everything. It's really hard to have a hardcore playbook like that.
Tom Rudnai (13:14)
Realistically, you're always going to draw from things people have done before, right? Like it's pretty unlikely. It'll make for a great Ted Talk one day if we do, but it's pretty unlikely at Demand Genius that we ever invent anything particularly new in terms of a tactic.
Chuck Moxley (13:28)
Right.
Tom Rudnai (13:28)
but the
way that you blend them in and the way that you incorporate different things into our machine over time probably does end up being relatively unique right and that's to me where certainly I'm going to need support and probably a lot of founders would benefit from support earlier than they would otherwise think too. I want to come back to what you said about the the patterns though
When you come into a startup that's just building out marketing, what are the non-negotiables that you would, that you come in and straight away you're looking to get right before you do anything else?
Chuck Moxley (13:58)
Anytime I've come in, typically the company has gone a period of time without. And so when I come in, I am hit. You know, the salespeople were excited there. And I'm suddenly hit with we need a new sales deck. We need a new website. We need, you know, new collateral. We need new, you know, et cetera. And there's this whole long list of things. I know what I always say.
And I don't think people find this frustrating. think they get the point. But what I always stop and say, hey, that's tactics. I actually draw like a pyramid. I have a pyramid. I say, that's the tactics. If we start there, you're going to get really frustrated. And I have examples. I even have a new client that I onboarded less than two months ago. They had some stuff that we had to get done because they had some events coming up and we had to kind of run some stuff ahead. And then when we did it, they're like, And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly why. That's because we didn't do the founding.
So I always start with the foundational and where most companies...
don't have is clear messaging, clear differentiation, and what I call the brand foundation. So we always start with know thyself, know thy competitors, know thy customers. It starts with a lot of customer interviews and understanding why people have bought you and what they see about the product or the solution that is so powerful. And then how do we turn that into a compelling strategic buyer narrative, a story that's gonna bring it, and then how do we find a way to break through? Almost any company I'm gonna work with is not the
billion dollar company that they're competing with. They all compete with billion dollar companies that are going to, that are out there that have the brand awareness and all that, right? And so I'm dealing with a lot of companies that are on that smaller side. The great part is we'll do things, we can do things that the billion dollar company cannot. They won't do, they don't have the guts to do, they don't have the structure to do. So what I try to do is once we figured out what we want to say and we figured out all the foundational work, we got to find a way to bring that to life.
in a unique way that's going to stand out. That regardless of what the medium is, it's got a compelling way to break through that differentiates a company and tells a story. And almost every company I come into, you read their website, you can't really tell what they do.
It's, know, and their messaging has just gotten very muddied over time. So that's the first thing I do is really sharpen that message and then develop the strategy of how are gonna build that. And I talk about a 360 degree surround message. How do we now bring that to life in all the mediums? Because that's the other thing is sometimes I'll come in and go, well, we ran this campaign and it's just not doing much for us. There's not one thing that will work in the way B2B buyers buy today.
People don't see one ad and buy it just doesn't happen. Maybe, you know, maybe you get lucky on occasion.
Tom Rudnai (16:33)
Yeah. You get lucky.
Chuck Moxley (16:37)
But it's a and there's all kinds of data out there to talk about all the touch points that are required. The fact that people will start shopping and start evaluating solutions six months or a year before they're ready to buy. By the time they get into buying cycle, they've already got three solutions in mind because they've been listening to podcasts. They've been seeing social posts. They've been watching ads. They've been reading about all these these companies and they've started forming opinions. And if you wait until then to get your message in front of them, you're going to be behind the eight ball. So.
that we then build out the strategy that's going to get them and start to get that message out there and it's going to help everything work. Even if they're doing cold outreach. know, CEOs love cold outreach. It's easy to control. It's easy to spin up and spin down. So they love doing email. They love doing the cold calling. The problem is that that's the only thing you're doing. You're reaching a very small percentage of the market, right? Because 15 % of people will pick up a phone.
Call from a number they don't recognize 85 % of people want that's 85 % of people out of the mix You know email the open rates are abysmal now, right? It's you know, 1 % or less, right? So if you start
doing I've done this as a Venn diagram before you start doing that Venn diagram. It's a very small percentage of the audience that you can reach with cold or outreach alone. But if you're doing other things, if you're out there in other medium and you're doing cold outreach, when I reach out to you, I go. What we hear a lot is they'll go, you know, I've been hearing about XYZ company. I've been hearing about that because they heard it from all these other sources. They're much more open to taking that call or or responding to an email. So sorry, that was a long winded answer to the point of you got to start with the foundation.
pieces. Typically messaging is not right. That's the piece that if you don't fix the messaging we can it's kind of putting like it's kind of the expression putting lipstick on a pig. We can make beautiful ads all day long but if it doesn't have the right message it's kind of a pointless.
Tom Rudnai (18:28)
It's funny that that exact same metaphor or expression came into my head a minute ago while you were talking. I think there's a couple of things I want to come back to there. I love your point about like...
the impact that brand has, that's probably pretty invisible on everything that happens across go to market is how we look at content. And you can often be the two things vaguely similarly. Like it's often, it's historically seen as a channel. It's not, it's a foundation that sits across absolutely everything you do. You need to get that right. It doesn't mean you need to be churning out content like a billion dollar company would, but you need to understand your content IP and your brand narrative first as the foundation. And then that runs through absolutely
Absolutely
everything and there will be an impact across everything a lot of the work that we do Demon Genius is to try and like Quantify that halo effect that you get a little bit
Chuck Moxley (19:17)
if you look at what's the hot topic right now in SEO.
that that typical SEO is going away. You GEO or AI, AEO, whatever term you prefer. If you look at what drives that brand becomes a big part of that is that brand awareness of getting the mentions in other places, getting that that awareness. So it's I just comment on somebody's post the other day. It's like brand went away at some point and B2B people start going out. You can't spend on brand. You got to spend on things. I want to spend a CEO's would say I want to spend $100 and see $1000 come out of here. I want that replicable, that repeatable.
pattern and all that and they only wanted to invest in things that you could tie immediately to attribution and all that. And I think there's this wake up happening in the B2B world going brand is kind of important and brand drives everything else and brand now is going to help you get into those AI powered searches and brand helps SEO. I mean it's it's I've had so many conversations last week about SEO and and how much.
Old is new again. How many of the core tenants of SEO work in the AEO or GEO, whichever term you prefer?
Tom Rudnai (20:22)
Can we all just agree on an acronym?
Chuck Moxley (20:24)
I know,
I know, I know. We never say SEO or, it's always SEO, but for whatever reason, we haven't agreed on a term for AI. Cause there's like.
Tom Rudnai (20:32)
It's the
first time that our sector has ever had trouble coming up with an acronym. It's what we do best.
Chuck Moxley (20:37)
That's true. That's true. You would think that would have been the first thing we had nailed.
Tom Rudnai (20:41)
but yeah, have to completely agree with everything you're saying.
We're learning to quantify the effect that brand has better
And I think it depends a little bit on how you define brand, right? Just cause you prioritise brand doesn't mean that you have to go and start running TV ads or anything like that, right? Which is what historically I think is a brand is associated with. If we're defining brand as knowing who you are, who you're for and how are you going to communicate that? The brand foundations, then that's like the first thing to get right.
Chuck Moxley (21:12)
Right, right. And while B2B can do TV today, is which didn't used to be the case, but now because of the targeting in theory, the challenge there is going to be getting a spot, you know, because the cost of the spot so expensive, because I did a ton of TV in my early part of the career. But but you're right, it's it's brand is how you show up and the messaging and the conversation that you have out in the world. And it can happen in a number of different ways. But I think the myth there
Tom Rudnai (21:19)
We can't.
Yeah.
That's it.
Chuck Moxley (21:40)
again is this traditional funnel of it's a linear purchase process. If you can get out of your head and B2B, it is no longer linear is and you know, everybody dark funnel was that was a popular term a couple of years ago and all that. But the concept that people are empowered today, there's I actually co-authored a book a few years ago that was published by McGraw Hill and one to one marketing. And one of the things we talked about was Forrester came out with this.
this thinking, gosh, 10 years ago where they were saying the power has shifted from brands. used to be brands could control price. You could control how you buy a product, how you find out about a product, where you buy it, who you buy it through, et cetera. In today's world, you can go, you know, even if you're selling on Amazon, I can go look up a thousand reviews and make a decision about that. Right. So the brand has so little control anymore and the buyer is in control. Once we understand that.
Tom Rudnai (22:31)
Yeah.
Chuck Moxley (22:33)
we can get out of that mode of I have to take them through this funnel and I have to measure it based on this way and just accept that if I get out there with the right message and hit the right people and the right frequency and reach the right people, I'm going to drive pipeline. And there's ways we can see that. Because the other thing that I moved away from a couple years ago was gating content and the old gated assets and the leads and I...
Companies always tell me, hey, we need top of funnel leads. That's like the first thing that I hear and I go, you don't need leads. You need qualified prospects who are aware of you and interested. That's what we need to drive, right? We don't need somebody to fill out a form just to get an ebook. So moving away from a gated model means we have to measure in different ways, but there are signs or proof of life that we can measure earlier in the cycle before somebody raises their hand in a sales led model and says, I want to meet with a salesperson.
I want to see the product. I want to demo it. And so there's there's things that we can track and understand in an ABM world, account based marketing world, which we're doing primarily in B2B, right? All this stuff is manageable. All this stuff is doable. You can get the right insights, but you also have to a little bit of faith that says I'm going to spend for a little while. I'm going to invest and I'm not going to see immediate returns. That's one of the things I always.
try to manage expectations with clients are we're going to launch this, it's going to take a period of time for it to work because people are not immediately buying. Could we get a little bit of demand capture? Potentially. There may be some early wins, but the reality is if you're building demand, it takes time. But the great part is, is when you get those the the wheel spinning or the plate spinning, that's expression, get the plate spinning in the air, they last a long time.
Because I've had that where client will later start to back off spending and we still see inbound pipeline coming in because the wheels were in motion. People were already in the movement of it. so it's just it's a long term. It's life is long. I wish we could I wish we could just spend a dollar and make two. And there's very few categories that that works anymore. And if there are must be consumer on the consumer side
Tom Rudnai (24:42)
I think it's a really interesting point you raise about the fact that you can back off a bit without it being bad, though, because I think we often view marketing spend as something you run
and then you have to sustain. It's almost like you can be deliberate about, look, if you need to back off for a quarter, you can do that. Is that a conversation that happens and you consciously because we have a hole in the budget and we need to capitalize on the momentum we've built rather than keep building it?
Chuck Moxley (25:01)
Yeah.
Or you can shift where you're spending or shift what you're doing. One thing that I've learned, and this is, think 2020, pandemic kind of changes, July and August, we used to still spend in July and August. And now I just pull back spending greatly because people are on the beach. People just decided, and again, I tie it back to COVID. It's like the world changed after that. And I saw a major shift.
Because again, I've been doing this for a while, right? I saw a major shift from the late teens to the to the early 20s of July and August. And I was in companies where we just kept spending. We're like, OK, we've to spend more because our pipeline, we're not seeing the pipeline. We've got to keep the pipeline up. And I finally had to go. No, July and August people on the beach. They're not downloading ebooks. They're not researching products. We just have to accept there's a seasonality to it. And rather than spend during that, let's let's adjust our spending. Let's not spend during that.
and know when they come back in September and you got the Q4 budgets, that's when you have to really be out there. So you start preparing, there's stuff, it's not that you don't go completely, it's not that you go completely dark, but you don't spend, especially on the paid stuff, you don't spend heavily in July and August. And that works, and I do the same thing. When I get to November, late November and December.
Tom Rudnai (26:11)
Hmm.
Chuck Moxley (26:21)
You know and people are at Christmas and their parties and all that kind of stuff unless you've got if you're in a market where you can capture a lot of Budgets are going to wait the end of the year You may still do some spending but the reality is in that last month if they weren't already in a buying cycle three or four months earlier mean, I have a client who has a has a sales cycle average sales cycle six point nine months So, you know, it's like we run ads and we get a lead and three months or two months later The CEO would say well, why isn't that closed?
show me one deal that's closed in two months. It's just, that's just not the sales cycle. So we have to feed it and we have to think of that long term. And that's why you can afford to not spend in the last couple of weeks of December when people aren't paying attention because you've already got stuff in the sales cycle. And then as you come into January, you ramp it back up. So you can definitely adjust. You can definitely adjust spending and those little blips in the old world of where you had to do it on MQLs and
SQLs and you had to have a certain number of form fills, you couldn't do that. You had to keep up that, you had to just keep spending in those dips to get the form fills. It's just at some point you're going against human nature. And so in a world today where we start to focus much more on pipeline, we can take a longer view of it and start to, start to.
Invest in longer term things because that's the other thing is you know when I come in a company SEO Well SEO is not going to do much for you for at least 90 days if we started right now It's going to take at least 90 days, right? PR PR is a great investment, but PR can take six months to a year analyst relations for certain companies great great investment But that's a year-long thing and so companies today sometimes don't even have that kind of Horizon time horizon
So you need short term and then longer term, but the more longer term you can understand and the ability to be able to report over time and show that you're building pipeline. That's why I, and there's a whole debate on LinkedIn all the time about marketers aren't supposed to drive pipeline or marketers aren't revenue, you know, that fails. Yes, but what the CEO, CEO has never cared about an MQL. CEO has never cared about a lead. They say they do, but they really don't care about leads. They care about sales.
Sales come from pipeline. So what I can drive is pipeline. I can't close pipeline in a sales led model. In PLG I could, but in a sales led model, I can't close pipeline, but I can drive pipeline. And so I focus everybody on pipeline. It's a longer term metric that is so much more valuable than leads or MQLs or some of the short term.
Tom Rudnai (28:53)
I think all of the way that we used to do things made a lot of sense because a buyer journey was pretty linear. You were selling to a single person often who was empowered to tool their department up. So when you're selling to one person, suspect my buy journey often is fairly linear.
But so in that process, everything is pretty predictable. and it made sense that we had understood what the leading KPIs were, right? So if we want someone to ultimately come out of the bottom of the funnel with revenue, we knew what the leading KPIs were and so we built teams focused to do that. What has happened that we haven't reacted quickly enough to in my opinion is...
The way that you buy has changed, now like 13 different stakeholders each getting involved so there's no longer linear, it's this looping mess but our KPIs still assume linearity and it can cause massive problems then when you have a load of people focus on MQLs which no longer correlate with closing a deal particularly.
Chuck Moxley (29:47)
Right, right. Well, and what we started seeing, one reason we walked away from gating, I did a whole case study on this that's out there, but what we started seeing was, and this started happening, gosh, three years ago. People, number one, one of the things we noticed is on the forum, we'd have a thousand people come and we'd have 10 people fill out the form because people just didn't want to fill out a form to get a piece of content. Second, 50 % of the people that filled out the form gave us bogus emails.
Tom Rudnai (30:10)
Hmm.
Chuck Moxley (30:14)
So there was no value in it. It's not like we could put them on a nurture sequence and it would bounce, right? So there was no value in that. And as soon as we quit gating it and we opened it up, we started getting a lot more exposure, started getting a lot more people coming back. And that's what we started measuring. Did they come to the website once? Did they come back to the website? The other thing we were able to look at, at the time, the company I worked for, we had a product, our own product could tell us this, that...
when in the gated model, we were getting like a page and a half on average that people were consuming. As soon as we ungated it, we were getting more like five pages of time spent on the market because they come on, they learn something, they go, huh, that's kind of interesting. Well, what does this company do? Let me go find out, let me go research. But we were turning away 90 % of the people with the gate. you know, all that is learning, but the idea that the sales cycle, about the same time, I started trying to look for a new
I didn't like the funnel. didn't like the whole Gartner, the 42 arrows going on, you know, in the whole bed. I was using that. And the only thing I can come back with, am not a sports person, so I always get nervous when I use sports analogies. I usually mess them up. But I couldn't find a better example than a football field. Of the idea of you're taking the football, you're going from the one end of the field to the other end of the field.
You've got your seller who's a player, but you've got this team you're going up against. The team is Entranced Solutions. The team that you're going up against is Competitive Solutions, Buyer Apathy, Market Forces, Budget, all these things, right? What we do is we put one seller out there. We put a seller and go, OK, go knock down all those things. Well, instead, we put out an SDR or BDR. We put out, sometimes we involve CS earlier in larger deals, get them involved in the process.
Marketing can help a lot. Now you've got a bigger team. But the reality is the ball in a football game, the ball never goes all the way down the field. It gets stopped. It advances. It goes backwards. It advances more. It goes backwards. And that's how deals are today. You get this momentum. They come in. They're really psyched. And suddenly they go dark. And you're trying, you're trying, trying. They go dark. They go dark for a while. Person leaves.
Now you're back to grounds here. OK, well, we had two other people involved. Let me go try to get those people. We can OK, well now they're placement hired. OK, well now the deal spun back up. I mean, it's just it is the way we buy and I couldn't think of a better analogy than the football field.
Tom Rudnai (32:31)
I kept waiting for you to trip up on your analogy as well, like you get the football down the field and then shoot the puck in the basket and score a goal and great home run. But you nailed it, that was all football references.
Chuck Moxley (32:42)
Okay, good, good. I've talked about
it enough. I've ironed out the details, I think.
Tom Rudnai (32:47)
I also think of it as being like vaguely related to where we are in the cycle of how we fund ourselves as businesses though, right? So historically, SaaS companies have been the shiny thing for venture capital, right?
We benefited from that and we built out pretty inefficient processes that allowed us to, I call it like corporate steroids, right? To just juice our way to growth. Doesn't have to be efficient, doesn't have to be smart. They have to take a long-term view because we're just gonna throw cash at the problem. What we then saw is we weren't really the shiny thing anymore. Lovable were and cursor were and all those kinds of products, but we're stuck with the same model that's inefficient and it's increasingly there is pressure on that and it's reaching breaking point. And I think you've got this whole generation of companies that have
got onto that ladder and then essentially the ladder has been kicked away. So I think it's going to be really interesting what happens over the next five, 10 years, because I think you will have a generation of companies and I aim to kind of ask among these that build in a much smarter way, but you've just got that poor group that were caught in the middle. Is that something you see? And have you seen the...
When founders coming through recently, do you see more patience from them than maybe you did 10 years ago from founders you worked with or CEOs that you worked with in terms of buying into a more sustainable, way of building a company?
Chuck Moxley (34:07)
Yeah, and I don't know. I don't know that I've got enough data to speak in a global sense on it that I've spoken with enough of them. But I think the whole lean startup and, you know, the fact that funding is tough these days to get and there's a lot of companies going after very little money. I think it's changed the way they think about it and they tend to be much scrappier about it. And they tend to look for those unfair advantages as levers that they can pull. I think sometimes where it hurts them is
they don't when to pull the trigger, right? Part of that is what's the right point to pull the trigger and tend to sometimes grow a little too slowly and then they have trouble getting that momentum going. So it's a really fine balance of figuring that out and trying to figure out what's going to X that. And you see all those companies out there that have founder-led content and all this stuff and they've...
gone from zero to 10 million ARR with the no spend and marketing and all that stuff. Everybody wants to do that. Well, it's just not the right thing model for every company. Not every founder is that kind of founder and not every company is gonna be lightning in a bottle. So there are the fundamentals. where I've tried to work with sort of these early stage companies and I've actually partnered with a fellow fractional CRO and a fractional CEO.
And we go into some of these early stage companies and our goal is how do we get you to initial product market fit faster than you can do it on your own? Because they can dink around and it's that point where you go from selling to the people in the CEO's Rolodex. Those are the easy sales. How do you get actual people who haven't heard of you to buy your product and to validate that your problem solves a problem worth paying for? And it's not, I'm not talking about true product market fit where the whole market's taken off.
It's what we call IPMF, it's an initial product market fit. And how fast can we get you there? Because if we can take that from, some companies can take three years to get there, and they can run out of money along the way. If we can take that from three years to under a year, and you really nail the messaging, you nail who your ICP is, you get those first few customers, you get your financial house in order, you get the product strategy in order and all that, I think they're in a better place to scale.
I probably didn't answer your question very well, but I think it's kind of all over the board. I think the myth of LinkedIn and all these founders going on and telling these amazing stories of how I did a bunch of LinkedIn posts and I grew my company at $10 million. I think that works for some companies, but other companies need some of the foundational stuff. And the question is, when do you invest in it when can you afford to invest in it?
Tom Rudnai (36:39)
I hate those posts. It's like the new version of gated content There's nothing even behind the gate. They never send it to you or they do and it's like a one page thing. It's just cheap engagement. Awful. Hate it. Anyway, I don't guess. ⁓
Chuck Moxley (36:48)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I
built my whole playbook. Connect with me and tag me in the comments. Yeah. And then they get 3000 comments.
Tom Rudnai (36:58)
Yeah, exactly. You never get the playbook. Or if you do it, it's like a one pager that they'd obviously chuck together in a day with AI. Or not even a day.
Chuck Moxley (37:05)
Or it's a 4,000 page Notion database. I go in and I spend a few seconds and I go, I would have to go buy their whole methodology. I'd have to go learn the whole methodology and adopt it. And then I get busy and I go move on.
Tom Rudnai (37:22)
Yeah, no, for sure. I think it's interesting to put on market fit thing, right? Because I often try to think of it whilst I...
It's bit, there's always going to be an element of iteration towards product market fit and like message market fit. And I think it's very easy to look at people who strike gold and immediately go to 10 million or something and think, man, they must've had something in the underlying product or the idea or the gap that they thought they'd seen, which was way better than mine. But I don't think that's necessarily true. It's iteration. And so you're always, there's an element of luck or maybe it's skill, but there's always going to be some people who on the first iteration, they strike gold and it's going to be some people.
I
mean Figma is a great example. It took them like three years to get any revenue. They just did alright. It's very typical. So I think you, I more and more look at building a startup as just being like keep yourself in the game and keep iterating on the messaging and it will come. And there's loads of ways to test messaging without the product now as well, which is a great use of content I think that often is overlooked.
Chuck Moxley (38:06)
Right.
Absolutely. And AI allows for some of that where you can do synthetic panel testing. There's a lot of there's so much opportunity today to really fine tune that and to figure that out. But the point is you got to get out. You got to get out and start trying some stuff. You got to get the and do your best at get coming out. But I've done the strategic narrative process with a number of companies. You almost never get it 100 percent right on the first time out of the gate.
You get it out, you test it with some customers, you get good feedback, you go out, and there's usually a process six months to a year where you're realizing, ah, there's some piece we missed. There's something that disconnects conceptually what we're trying to say and customers understanding, oh, here's exactly what you're doing, how you can help me. And so you've got to go back and tweak. And so there's nothing that's ever final, nothing that's ever 100%. You learn from all of that, but you got to get out and you got to start trying different.
And I think you're right. I was around in the, you know, the dot com days and your perception of dot com days back then, it was like that you'd have these people like Mark Cuban and all these people who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the original. And you think everybody's that. And when you go out to Bay Area and you're out there and you see how many startups are and how many fail, including some spectacular successes or success, spectacular failures, you start to realize it's a it's a true one percent.
that strike it, get in at the right time with the right company, figure it out, sell at the right time and time all of that. But you get the perception when you go out there, because again, I was much younger back then, out, thought for sure I'd make it big, I was employee 13 for a company, the whole bit. And you think you're gonna strike it rich and you suddenly realize that 99 % of the people...
Tom Rudnai (40:08)
Hmm.
Chuck Moxley (40:09)
I made money on the real estate by moving to the Bay Area.
Tom Rudnai (40:11)
Silver linings. Well Chuck, I've loved this. I've kind of realised we're coming to the end of our time. I've not really even asked you any questions. We kind of just chatted. I don't know whether that makes it a good podcast or a bad podcast. I think it's good. No, likewise. I should ask you some questions before the end. let's do a couple of quick fires if you've got another five minutes for us.
Chuck Moxley (40:13)
Yeah, silver linings.
Yeah, no, I've had a blast. It's been a great conversation. ⁓
Sure.
Tom Rudnai (40:35)
Okay, first one, for you personally, what skill or trait in your career, would you say has been the biggest needle mover for you?
Chuck Moxley (40:43)
So skill or trade. Okay, I'm going to answer it in the wrong way and then you can you can course correct me. I think the number one thing that has made me successful and the number one thing that that people struggle with is curiosity. If you don't have curiosity, if you're not if you're not constantly as we've talked about analyzing what other people are doing and figuring out what works.
and accepting that I don't have all the ideas, but I'm intellectually curious about that. So like on weekends, I listen to five, six, seven podcasts and I tag a bunch of stuff and I'll go back and share that with team members and things. and it's again, I'm not junior in my career. I've been around, I could just go, hey, I know everything I need to know, but I am always so curious and always trying to figure out what other people are doing. And that is something that was instilled in me and my father. And I've talked about that. He was a naturally curious person.
I think that's an overlooked superpower that if you do it because I've always joked I don't have any original ideas. I steal everything. I see what other people do. I go I like that. I'm going to take that. I'm going to try it this way. I'm going to adjust a little bit and do it. I just think curiosity is is undervalued. Characteristic.
Tom Rudnai (41:56)
Yeah, no, I
think that's very good answer. Second one, so if I, this is always an interesting one, if I were, let's say for one of the startups that you go in, let's say you were given a blank cheque to do one project that, and yeah, but money is no object, what would you do with that startup? What's like the thing that you've always wanted to do, but no one's ever been stupid enough to give you the money to do?
Chuck Moxley (42:13)
man.
⁓ gotcha. So, so that,
yeah. Well, I suppose I'd have to say Super Bowl ad, right? Never done a Super Bowl ad. That would be, you know, I wouldn't recommend if they're only funding one thing. Now, if, if it's a blank check and I can do a lot of things, Super Bowl ad could be interesting. It depends on the category. I, I'm a contrarian in that way. Outside of that, I mean, I, I do think there's tremendous opportunity now.
Tom Rudnai (42:24)
There we go.
Chuck Moxley (42:43)
in TV and the ability to target. It's kind of come full circle in that sense. The biggest drawback to it is how do you produce a commercial? So I've got a client now who's going, well, I hear you can produce, you know, with AI, you can produce a pretty good commercial, you know, for 500 bucks. I'm like, well, you know, it might be worth exploring. we can get it, if we can get the commercials, the hard part, the ads, the hard part, the placing the media is cheap now. The targeting is good.
You can do all that. So I don't know that would be that's the area I'm I Would love to do a little more experimenting in personally Yeah
Tom Rudnai (43:18)
Interesting. That's cool.
Maybe we'll start small and work up to the Super Bowl. Although we could do something cool with your football field analogy. I think that there's something there for the right company. And then the flip side of that, what's the biggest fuck up that you've ever made in your career? Like a heart stopping moment.
Chuck Moxley (43:23)
There you go.
Love it.
Yeah, I've had a few. The one I often talk about and I'm going to go back a little bit in time. We working this in the agency while we working on the Lee Jeans, which, you know, is a jeans company. And we developed a program for them that went on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for breast cancer. But we were the agency that developed the program for them called Lee National Denim Day. And again, you got to go back 20, 30 years. People didn't wear jeans to work. So the concept was the
The underlying goal was how can we make genes acceptable at work? Because if we can make genes acceptable at work, they'd sell more genes. That was the revenue goal, right? The way we did it was we partnered with Lee National Dental Day, who sponsored Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. So it's for breast cancer. And so was one Friday in October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Companies would allow their employees to wear jeans, but to do so, they had to pay like 10 bucks, donate it basically to this charity. That was the concept. First year we went out with this. We went out with a direct mail campaign that was incredibly successful, and we ran full page ads in Fortune and Forbes to go target these companies and promote it. And what was new back then was they were introducing new exchanges. So instead of 800, we use like 888 or one of the new exchanges. What we didn't know was
corporate PBX systems had not been programmed to use them. So the direct mail, what had started happening was people were trying to call the number, they couldn't get the number to go. They looked up the headquarters and called the CEO's office. I literally had to put a staff member at the CEO's office for a week to field all the calls coming in. They were coming in to handle it. And we had to go on press at Fortune and Forbes and change the number, like at two in the morning.
So the ads didn't go out with the wrong, with the phone number that didn't work. So that's one of my big, big, big moments. That was stressful time, great, turned out to a great program.
Tom Rudnai (45:18)
Hahaha!
Nice.
That's a good one. think that's probably the best one we've had because you don't get them quite the same way if it's digital now because it's like, this post went out and I just went on and quickly edited it. You can't mess up quite like you used to.
Chuck Moxley (45:42)
No, no,
when you've sent out 10,000 direct mail pieces and you've got ads running in Fortunate Forums.
Tom Rudnai (45:48)
Yeah,
no, agreed. And then the very last one, but quickly a recommendation that you'd have for people who who are listening to this, whether it's a book, a podcast, a thought leader you love.
Chuck Moxley (45:58)
gosh, you know, if you're a marketer, I I'll give a plug for a podcast that I there's because I get I'm a big podcast listener and there's a number that I love, but there's one I listen to every single week and it's called Do This Not That and they're short. He actually records like three episodes a week. I wish I could remember the guy's name. I'm drawing a blank, but really entertaining, really smart stuff. He runs an agency that works with a lot of brands and so he's got really good advice.
But if you got time for just one podcast on the weekend or whenever you're listening to your podcast, I'm a big fan of Do This Not That. I think it's in the top 100 podcasts now. It's become pretty popular, but it's all about marketing stuff. And the guy's super entertaining, so it's a fun listen.
Tom Rudnai (46:42)
Nice, excellent. Every time I ask this question, people just direct people to other marketing podcasts that aren't this one. So I think I need to stop it at some point, but I will check it out.
Chuck Moxley (46:52)
You were hoping
I'd say, it's your podcast. Absolutely.
Tom Rudnai (46:56)
No one has yet but one of these days.
Chuck I've loved this. Thank you very much for joining. I will let you get on with your day. Yeah it's been a blast and thank you everyone who's listened this far as well.
Chuck Moxley (47:07)
Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it.