Phil: What's up everyone today. We have the pleasure of sitting down with Liam Maroney, co founder of storybook marketing, About Liam --- Phil: Liam started his career in various industries, wearing several different marketing hats, and eventually he landed at news cred, a content marketing agency for enterprise teams. Where he started leading demand gen before shifting to client side and advising clients on attribution and ROI. He then had revenue marketing leadership stints at various different startups across different industries, like personalization, travel, mobile, and identity verification. He then started his entrepreneurial journey by founding a consulting firm for growth stage B2B companies. And he's also a contributing writer, uh, at marktech. org recently started his own podcast also called. And today Liam is the co founder of Storybook Marketing, a full service demand gen agency for B2B SaaS, specializing in paid media programs. Liam, thanks so much for your time today. Really excited to chat. Liam: too. Thank you so much for having me. Phil: I wanted to start off with, uh, so like I just said, before we hit record, uh, creeped a lot of your LinkedIn posts and have been a follower for quite a bit of time. Why Marketing Shouldn't be Reduced to a Pipeline Number --- Phil: One of the narratives that you've fought hardest in a lot of your posts on LinkedIn is that marketing should not be Be reduced to a pipeline number back in the day. Marketing was thought by many to be like the arts and crafts department. Right? Like, and we've come a long way to using data to shore impact. I don't think your suggestion that like we go back to the days where we are like less data driven, but what's your beef with owning a pipeline number, Liam? Hmm. Liam: Let me unpack that a little bit because I do think, I think there's a few things that are in there. I, It's not necessarily that I have a problem with marketing owning a number, like, there should be an accountability for sure. What I think we've done is we've over indexed quite a bit. Actually, John Miller is a really good example of this, because he is, um, partly responsible for a lot of this, and is, is admitting it himself, that the sort of previous arts and crafts perspective that marketing had, I think that's, um, I think that was reflective more of the immaturity of B2B than anything else, because in B2C, yes, marketing also struggles to prove what it's doing, and was it showing results, but it's definitely not perceived as the arts and crafts department. I think that's a B2B thing that needs changing, but I think that in pursuit of changing that, and I'm sort of paraphrasing what John Miller has said a few times, was that, The marketing tried to show that it was a data driven function and that it was, it was not a cost center and that it was a producer of outcomes. And I think that that's partly true, but I think it's narrowed the focus down way too much. So I, I've been a demand gen marketer for. A decade and I've seen demand gen change over that decade. I've also seen demand gen become synonymous with marketing, which it is not. I don't, I think it's representing too much of what marketing does because here's my real beef with the pipeline number piece. When marketing is owning a contribution to the overall pipeline, it means marketing is a channel. It means marketing is a source of a certain percentage of the overall pipeline. And then that means that it's not technically responsible for anything outside of that. And I think that that short sells marketing because if marketing the whole purpose of marketing is to make it easier to sell the product because more people know about it, more people believe that it works. More people have confidence that it's worth buying. So the whole concept of marketing is that marketing should make all sales easier. It should make deals faster. It should make more deals happen, bigger deals. And when marketing is only responsible for its contribution to the overall pipeline, it implies that it's not responsible for all of the pipeline. It is responsible for all of the pipeline. The only big difference between B2B and B2C marketing is that marketing in B2C is driving people to go and make the purchase. In B2B, it's driving people into the sales process to partner with a salesperson to buy the product. That's the only difference. Phil: Yeah. I've seen that firsthand, uh, actually migrated from B2B to B2C in the last like three, three or four years. And yeah, like it is quite a change from, uh, like at least marketing ops perspective is kind of what. My background is, so there often is a very different marketing ops team because you're not supporting a big, large sales team. There's not like a long sales cycle and a bunch of like, uh, pipeline stages and who's fighting for a contribution for revenue, like it's kind of all coming from the same place. But Is Marketing Being Long Term Just an Excuse to Hide from Carrying Quota --- Phil: what do you say to folks who think that marketing. That like this idea that marketing is long term is just an excuse to hide from carrying a quota or like hitting a number is marketing. The only function that has to balance both this idea of like short term and long term and make those trade offs more than other functions, maybe. Liam: I I don't think it is. I think it gets slightly picked on a little bit for this because I think there's this kind of perception that marketing wants to, to not be held accountable. But I don't think that's necessarily true. Like I think you could look at data science, for example. Data science isn't producing data. Anything this quarter, it's producing insights that are everyone believes will lead the company towards better decision making. You could make the same argument for a wealth advisor. You could, you know, anything that's future looking is future looking for a reason. I think marketing just got assumed to be a, what did you produce this quarter? And it's hard to get out of that. And. Like, hands up, we are our own worst enemies on this. We have, we have sold in things that were not realistic. We have oversold what marketing is capable of. We have doubled down on being the pipeline generation function. So like a lot of this is, is a, you know, a mistrust of our own making. But I think that marketing is both long and short term. I think in general. Marketing's job is to produce future customers ultimately, and you do that by making more people aware of the product, but there is always and should be in B2B and in B2C, a wing of marketing whose job it is, is to activate on stuff now. I mean, you, you, the B2C example is, is a kind of an easier one to identify because you know, you're running brand campaigns, you're doing advertising, you're creating awareness for the product, but then there's also the You know, in store specials that are driving immediate activity. It's the same concept. It's demand gen is activating today on brand awareness that was built many, many months ago, and both have to run in partnership with each other because demand gen is ineffective. If you have no brand awareness, um, again, John Miller said this only recently, you could be doing the best demand gen in the world, but if you've got bad brand awareness or a poor brand perception. Won't matter. There's a good argument that you could be doing really good brand awareness and bad demand gen, and you'll still succeed. But truthfully, they are, they are both long and short term. You have to have them in concert with each other. Phil: I love this bit of wisdom in a one year post about attribution being broken because marketing is not direct response. Marketing is meant to change audience perceptions and behaviors through increased brand awareness, right? So like, If folks listening right now who are in house marketers and, you know, they are preaching this over and over again, like you're saying to their C level, like we shouldn't own a pipeline number. We're not just direct response. And the C level is like, Cool. Cute story. How many leads did you drive this month though? Advice for Marketers Stuck with a Pipeline Number --- Phil: What advice do you have for those marketers that are stuck with this pipeline number who know the importance of building that brand? Do they push back? Do they still try to accomplish brand building stuff around their main objectives? Like what's your advice? Liam: I think, I mean, the funny thing is this has become a fairly sizable part of what we do as a business because you, you can't abandon today targets and anyone who tries to lose their job very quickly. So it's, it's, it's. It's very naive and it's easy for someone like me to write on LinkedIn going, think long term, but yeah, we all have targets. Um, every client that we work with has targets. We're held to those too. So you have to still show that you're doing the right stuff to address current state ones. But I think there's, there's a very big education problem. Um, some of it is marketers ourselves need to educate slightly better on what brand marketing is, but certainly I do think, and I, I reject this idea that only work for a CEO who gets marketing like there's like seven of them. So like we're all gonna be competing for the same jobs. A lot of our job, unfortunately, in this industry is about reeducating on what marketing is and how it works. And I've, I've gone through this when I was in house. I've been in this position where. My best advice is always show that you are doing the best things that are possible for marketing to do to hit near term goals. And sales is the one you have to align with, because if sales thinks marketing is off doing something, that's not helping their sales efforts. You're going to be called in very, very quickly. So a lot of it is like, talk through with them. Well, what problems are you trying to solve right now? Like what is making sales more difficult? Because the assumption is, and I've said this to a few people, The best advice is to ask sales, what problems they're dealing with, but then don't ask them how to solve that problem. That's where we go wrong. Because if you ask sales, what do you need? They'll go, I need more leads. I need more case studies. I need more collateral. I need more events to go to. And it's like, okay, that's one function of marketing. Let's, let's ask field marketing to take care of that and product marketing. But at the end of the day, it's what are you struggling with? What's making the sales harder? And when you ask those questions, you'll start to uncover things like, you know, we're included in the RFP, but we're number four, every single time we're there to round it out. Okay. That's really interesting. That probably means that you're not really in the consideration set. You're just being added in there to fluff it out because they're looking at the Gartner magic quadrant. So you have an awareness problem that we can solve, or they're saying things like people are coming in and they have this weird thought that we're like half the price that we are. Well, then there's clearly a perception problem in the market. We haven't demonstrated value. And the more you start to talk about what are the, The things that make it hard to sell this product, then that's when you can open the door to going, well, marketing does and should solve for that, but it does it in these ways. And a lot of it is then once you open the door to that, you would least in an ideal world, if you do a good job of this, you get yourself a bit more permission to say. Well, let me tell you what we could do. And let's dedicate a percentage of the budget to try and accomplish that. And let's identify things that are not working today that we can reallocate towards that. And it's a slow process, but there's no magic wand. But that to me has always been successful because as long as people trust, especially salespeople, that marketing understands what sales is trying to do and the problems they're trying to solve, you'll get permission to solve those problems. Okay. Phil: Very cool. So listening to folks and not necessarily dismissing the ideas of the short term stuff, like being real about it. And instead of asking sales what they need, like really have conversations about them. And like, where are you finding friction in the process? I love this, this idea of being able to think about Brand marketing versus demand gen. Is Brand Marketing the Same as Demand Gen? --- Phil: I know you, you've have a lot of posts on, on LinkedIn about that. Um, because like the, the common narrative in demand gen is that brand marketing is simply brand awareness of who you are. Right. And I know you've dispelled this a lot in this idea that demand gen is awareness about the problem you solve, why you should prioritize it and why you're the best at it. But I think it's probably one of your most controversial posts. And if you look at the comments there, but you basically claim that brand marketing is the same thing as demand gen, basically brand marketing for broad awareness is way too narrow of a goal and that it can be both brand and problem awareness. I wanted to like unpack that a bit because. Like I get the importance of the debate, like in big companies specifically, this is what influences resourcing and team structure. And sometimes even like strategy and measurement. Right. But does it actually matter what the difference is in those like nomenclature? Uh, nomenclature? Are we wasting time on like these debates, especially on LinkedIn? Like, is it unproductive or even like detrimental? Because in the real world, as I'm sure you've seen with clients and in your past in house life, people are Many campaigns have dual purposes. There's a lot of blurred lines between, is it better to integrate brand or, uh, demand avoiding redundancies? Like what's, what's your take there? Liam: I do think it matters. I really do. And I, I'll start with that point because I, I get accused of being pedantic. I get accused of being, Oh, this is all semantics. We're like, who, Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Liam: why are you fighting over a term? And the first thing I'll say is we, as marketers claim, and we have claimed for a very long time that the words we choose in our marketing work And has enormous impact. The difference between talk to sales and get a demo in a button supposedly makes the world of difference. Why would that not apply to the way that we do our jobs and the way that we actually talk about how we're solving problems? Um, I think it has to, that's a starting point, but the other bigger point, I think is we, we want to be treated as a really sophisticated discipline. Marketing is a really sophisticated discipline. We're sitting on 100 years of theory and thousands of years of actually doing branding. But like the discipline of marketing is very well established. And if we're not able to even articulate the right things, if we're using fuzzy words, if we're making up terms for things that already had terms, we risk looking like we don't know what we're doing. And And the scary part is I have heard this, I have heard at slightly larger tech companies that they are now starting to look at CMOs from outside of the B2B industry because they are classically trained, like I know you Amir, that they want people who understand the fundamentals of marketing because you look on LinkedIn and people are Calling things inbound led outbound and all bounds and like, you know, everything led marketing. And yet when you ask those same people, okay, define brand awareness, define the sort of aspect, what are the four P's name them? And you'll, you'll find that there's this massive gap and there's, there's a real credibility risk. And. When I get really pedantic about the differences about, like, what is demand chain, how much does it own awareness, what you often find in that argument, at least my perspective on it, is that there is, there is what shows through as a lack of understanding of the original definitions, and it's when people are saying, like, well, how Brand awareness is about making people recognize your logo or know your name. I was like, no, like Amy, any course in marketing would tell you that that's absolutely a very oversimplified reality. There's a whole spectrum and. If we can't even agree on what the original terms were, you can't go inventing new ones before you've learned the old ones. And, and what I've seen happen a lot with demand gen is that it has expanded farther and farther and farther into what marketing is when you look today at what the. The primary goals and KPIs are of a CMO or a VP of marketing in B2B tech, SAS specifically. It's exactly the same as the metrics that the head of demand gen owns, means that the, the top level of marketing in B2B SAS is essentially a head of demand gen. If you compare it to what the same CMO dashboard looks like in a B2C company where they are doing market research, voice of customer, stuff like that. And so like demand gen has become, and this is, this is very controversial and no one likes to be saying it's too big. It's, it's taken what feels like a bit of a land grab. And, and I did this in my own roles in house where I would say like, well, we should own content marketing and we should also own events and we should also own that. And eventually. I just owned 80 percent of the team and reported into the head of marketing and like, good for me, look great for my resume. But like, do I objectively think that was the right thing? Not really. And I think the only solution to solving that is. Define all of these things correctly and have a collectively agreed upon set of terms, because you cannot claim to be the science marketing if we don't even have the same shared terms. Like, can you imagine physicists having a different definition of gravity? Like, no, you can't. It doesn't work like that. Phil: Yeah, no, you've, you've convinced me. So like, I, I definitely see a lot of these posts on LinkedIn and, and like, sometimes it is, um, like a bit pedantic, but I think like, April Dunford put it best. I'm pretty sure it was her that said that she's like for a function that's supposed to be experts in the craft of writing and messaging, we have done a very poor job of messaging what the hell marketing is and what do we own with all of these buzzwords that we're introducing that I want to go back to your point about like the CMO dashboard, the demand gen dashboard and measurement. Um, It I'm sort of a recent, uh, multi Dutch attribution convert in the sense that I used to think it was the Holy Grail. And this was maybe like five, six, uh, ish years ago when a lot of SAS B2B companies were just trying to figure this out. Like, how do we. Assign a number to the value that marketing is bringing to the company. And over time, it's gotten more complex with like all the changes, right? We all know now that multi touch attribution isn't a silver bullet. It's not perfect. And most of the vendors today like admit that and they didn't before, but the golden alternative is being painted as kind of incrementality and marketing mix modeling. How do we Measure Marketing's Impact Today? --- Phil: What's your stance on how do we go about measuring marketing's impact today? How do we include things like brand and time lag and causality and all the things that multi Dutch attribution doesn't technically cover? Liam: Yeah, I mean it, this is the Probably the biggest, most important question, I think, that, that I keep asking myself, and I, I'm the same as you, I was, like, real drink the Kool Aid multi touch, like, for years, I was like, oh, we're gonna do a W shaped model, and we're gonna, like, and, it's sort of a, you know, I remember it was five years ago, probably more, where, like, We were, we thought we were on the way to perfect measurement, and then we only realized like, oh, wow, it's actually getting harder to measure. There were, there were, we've, the amount of touch points we will never have visibility into is ridiculous. I think even before going down the sort of, like, how do we become more MMM causality focused? I think there is the, how does marketing work to make people make different decisions that we have to get? Much more realistic about because the biggest problem in B2B tech and the biggest problem in B2B in general is that we've made this assumption that marketing is both linear and is something that you progressively increase the amount someone is ready to buy from you. The linear part is Is the hardest I think to grasp and it took me a long time to grasp this. And it's the reason that I became an advisor to an actual causality company, because I wanted to understand like, where am I completely biasing my thinking? And the biggest aha moment for me was that marketing's effect is nonlinear. And what that means is that I can see an ad today. That may make me make a decision months from now and there's no telling what that time will look like. And when you compound this onto lots of different people, you have all of this randomness happening because what you're doing is you're not getting people more and more convinced to buy something. That's just not how marketing works. That's how sales works. Marketing's job is to get you to be more aware of the product and to eventually Think of the product at moments when you have that problem that does not occur on our timeline that occurs on a very random timeline outside of our control and the hardest part is to get people to believe what you're saying, have confidence that you can do the thing that you were saying that you can do, and then the hardest part of all is to be close to mind when they've got the problem you solve. Now, There's things you can do along the way that nudge that. That's where demand gen comes in. It is to, to nudge a lot of these things forward. But the, the reason I say all of this is because when you start to step back and you go, Oh, so marketing is not a, I've shown you one piece of content. Now I'm going to add onto that and say, now, let me tell you about the features. Now, let me tell you about the benefits. Now, let me show you a case study. Now, let me show you social proof. That doesn't really work. That's not how people make decisions. And we think of people as. Not yet ready to buy slightly more ready to buy ready to buy and in reality, when you step back and realize that marketing's job is purely about awareness and association, it starts to change how you think about measurement, because now it's the value of things like. Is brand perception increasing, improving his brand awareness? Like those brand research studies have real material value. We don't do them because they're expensive and no one really cares, but they, they're a good bellwether for, are we doing a better job at being remembered by the audience? And then that's when you can get into the causality stuff where has all of this effort that we did has all of these things in these campaigns shown statistically that now there is a downstream impact where it can look in very different formats. We assume the outcome of all the marketing is more people. Raising their hand and coming in more leads, but some of the downstream impacts of marketing is that sales gets more efficient sales gets more effective. The close rates go higher. The deals get bigger. This is how the sales cycles get shorter. That's very hard to measure. The only way you could measure that is by. Statistically showing all of the marketing activities, showing external factors that may change seasonality, things like that, showing the change in deal cycle over time, the change in deal volume over time, the change in deal velocity. And then when you look at them, then you can stay statistically, Oh, these things actually do have a relationship to one another. That obviously is a big dream state for a lot of companies, but. At least when you conceptually understand that that's how that works, it opens the door to going, maybe we're, we're trying to measure marketing through a very, very narrow field of view and everything I've heard and everything I seem to learn about the causality analytics and MMM is that most of what we measure marketing as today through multi touch attribution doesn't Even necessarily just tell the wrong story. It doesn't tell the complete story. We actually undersell what marketing is doing because so much of it happens at a longer time span than we're able to measure. So it's, it's less that where we're sort of like disingenuously mark measuring marketing, it's that we're, we're not even measuring it completely and we're missing all of the real value that we otherwise would have been able to see. Phil: Super interesting. It's, it's very refreshing to hear you say that too. Like I've haven't been able to put it into words, but like this is something that, especially at my current startup, so I'm in the B two, B2C world and we're in health tech, and so we help conquer addiction with, uh, within companies. So companies come to us to help their employees kick their tobacco, alcohol, and opioid addictions, and. Marketing is Long Term, Not Direct Response --- Phil: What you talk about this idea that like we like marketing is so long term, like we aren't a direct response focused, like linear impact. I see that firsthand because addiction is so hard to change. Like, we're talking about lifelong structured behaviors for people. There's a whole stage of change for addiction. And our mandate changed from how can we send out messages to eligible employees and get them to convert and check out our product and like hopefully track their drinks or their their number of cigarettes or whatever. We changed that mentality to Like through user research, there is no way to convince someone to quit their substance use like we cannot make that decision for people. People need to make that decision themselves. And it relates to a lot of what you talked about. Like, there's the buyers timeline and it's like, so random. And there's. The stages of change. And it's even more random with addiction. And so now our focus is just like, how can we stay top of mind with eligible members as much as possible? And we're trying to move away from this like linear attribution way of saying like, we sent out this email, we saw these many signups, but after that email landed, like there were signups that happened and we didn't do an email. We didn't do a home mailer. Like. People at some point decide that they have a need for something or they want to make an action. And hopefully they remember us in this like moment of need or change. Right. Liam: I want to. I this is crazy. I've never thought I wanted to have this conversation. I really want to talk about the addiction thing for a second. Cause it actually is such an interesting, uh, thing because, so I, I don't talk about it often, but, um, So I, uh, 14 years ago, I quit drinking and smoking the same weekend Phil: Wow. Cold turkey. Liam: and I, it, it's. Cold turkey. straight away. And, and of course, like all now and, and the, the quick backstory without going down on a whole biography is that it was originally to quit smoking and that's what I wanted to do. I had had inklings in my head that I didn't like how much I drank. I didn't like how much it changed the amount of, Uh, decisions I made in my social life and social circle. And I was living in New York city. The, the price of cigarettes had gone up to like 14 a pack and was like, that feels like a good moment. So I made this random decision to just decide to do it. And, um, because I didn't want to go into bars where you could smoke. There were some areas that you could. And, um, I decided to not drink. So I decided, Oh, I'll do both of these. And it's funny. I only ever talk about when I quit drinking, but quitting smoking was honestly the more crazy one. Yeah. And exactly like you mentioned, I had, I had tried to quit smoking many times as all smokers do all the time. And I had seen the, the, the labels on the packs growing more and more aggressive about what it was doing to me, the damage, none of it convinced me because it wasn't the moment that actually was right for me. And the moments that are right, and I'm sure, you know, this far better is that they pop up randomly because you make an association where. You know, like you take a long plane ride and you're jittery the whole time and then you get off and you run to a place where you can go outside and have a cigarette and you just have that moment of going, that's not right, like that can, that, that moment just kind of goes, I feel embarrassed by this situation and that has triggered something in me and in the exact same way in marketing. And this is why I love the idea of category entry points as a concept, because it applies to smoking and it applies to drinking people don't buy things or make really significant considered decisions because you told them and convince them to make it. You gave them all of the reasons to be convinced and then something external connects the dots in their head where they're like, that's probably what they meant by this. Like, oh, that might be a problem. Like, you know, I, when I was drinking, I. Remember I had a bunch of friends who were going to go away for a weekend and they were going to go camping or something like this. And I chose not to go on a thing that sounded like a lot of fun because I would have missed out on a night out on a Saturday night. That's not a good thing. That's a weird decision to make on my part. And it was just like a, it was an association in your head. Very same as when you make a major purchase decision, something makes you go. We shouldn't be renters anymore. We should buy a house or maybe it's time to upgrade our car. This is probably one too many problems, or maybe it is time to invest in a CRM because we lost that deal because we didn't have the data that we needed. Like. It's always moments that create associations that trigger things and all marketing can do is try and keep that thought in your head so that when that thing comes up, there's something to connect it to. Phil: Yeah, love it. How do Startups Tackle Big Things like MMM and Causality? --- Phil: And I think that I want to unpack this for startups. Like we, we talked a lot about branding and how do we. Think about branding as this long term thing, and it's not linear, but we need to figure out the causality and MMM. Like how do startups tackle this stuff? Like nine out of 10 startups die. And so like investing in brand in the first year, like that in and of itself is hard to convince the founders to get on board with, but let's say like you do you, and you are able to convince the founders to like, Do a 70 30 split or whatever on demand gen direct response stuff and, and focusing on, on some branding stuff, like with little data science resources and almost no traffic, no historical data going back like three, four years. Like, I'm sure you have some customers that come to you that, that are smaller and have less of like a historical body. How do we tackle this for startups? Liam: It's a really good question. And. You know, like being very realistic, like an early stage startup that's in its first year and is on seed funding. No, they shouldn't be doing brand campaigns. Of course they shouldn't. But what they should be doing is starting to ask, what makes this hard to sell? And what role does marketing play in fixing that? Because the biggest problem that early companies have is that no one's heard of them. That's the hardest thing they can overcome. And because there's no trust in them. Now, what a lot of early companies do, you know, This happened with me with our agency. It's the very same thing is that you borrow credibility from other people. The founders are often the first people we've got connections. I've been around trust this company because you trust me. And then eventually you figure out how do you extend beyond that? So for a lot of early, early companies, the goal has not become a household name. The goal has become a known entity, or at least a trusted entity, either through your own efforts or by borrowing from someone else's. That can be partnerships that can be founders. Yeah. That can be joint ventures, whatever it looks like, but the goal is always like, what are it more about understand what makes this a risky purchase and how do you solve de risking that? And sometimes that is, well, we have to stand out and we have to prove that we've been doing this for a long time. We have to highlight the people that we've hired that have been doing this much longer than this company have existed. Brand takes shape in many forms. I think the idea that you have to create a quote unquote capital B brand isn't really the answer. It's how do you create awareness that you exist, confidence that you can do this and trust that you will deliver and that you'll still be around for long enough to renew the contract. Those are the things you solve those in variously different ways. Different ways, but those are the problems that brand is designed to solve. It's de risking a purchase. You just de risk it in the most effective way you possibly can. Phil: You mentioned earlier that, um, you and I are both, uh, the rare marketers who actually studied marketing and have thoughtfully perceived this as a career versus stumbling into it. It's funny because a lot of the folks on the show are just like, no marketing background, just kind of stumbled into it. Uh, we just spoke with, um, director, senior director of operations at Optimizely and she spoke Like seven years at the start of her career in, uh, as a dental hygienist or dental sales, one or the other, but she found her way into ops at a pretty badass company, but it's funny that we. I guess like classically trained to quote unquote, but I did have like a few courses on statistics, like back at university, barely even remember using SPSS, but like, I did hear about it. So like I must've played around with it, but like, we never really got intro into. Business intelligence or data viz. Like there was no looker Tableau practical elements to anything. There was no intro to like basic experimentation design. What is a hypothesis? What is like a statistical significance? Are Marketers Robbed of Basic Statistical Knowledge? --- Phil: Do you think marketers today are robbed of this statistical knowledge? How do we educate a new generation of marketers to be prepared to enter the workforce and talk about things like MMM and incrementality and help data science or resources to solve what the heck is marketing doing to contribute to the business? Liam: I I do, I definitely do think that marketing like has been robbed a lot of that. Like I did have the luxury that we had statistics courses when I did marketing. So that was very much part of mine. Tableau did not exist at that point. So it was purely statistics for the sake of statistics and understanding it. Data literacy is, is a big problem everywhere. But I think that it's, it is very dangerous to be data illiterate as a marketer when you are depending so much on tools claiming that they are. Showing results. If you don't know how to challenge those results, I think even even basic question asking is important where I've always said to anyone who's ever on my team to never trust a dashboard that you don't know how it was built. I don't don't if someone goes, Hey, the number is seven. It's like, tell me how you got to seven. If you don't know how to back into that, then you're, you're very exposed to someone else deciding whether you're not a good person. Did a good job or not, it was a terrible position to be in. And a lot of people are in exactly that position. They're just looking at a number going up or down and they don't know where they actually really doing anything to contribute to that. I think that there's. The sort of even kind of not just statistics itself. I think you mentioned like the classically trained sort of like went to college thing. I, I never wanted to be a gatekeeper and say like, I'm a better marketer because I, cause that's not true at all. But I do think that there is, there is a real obligation on us as marketers to stop what I do see a lot of, which is the kind of, um, almost like. Being proud of not being classically trained and there's this like, well, that's old marketing. We do new Phil: Yeah. Who cares about the four Ps? Liam: marketing can feel a lot of times like it it's, it's test tube marketing that doesn't work when you put it into the real world. And a lot of that, you do get told that like first day of the job, half of what you learned is it's nice in theory, but it doesn't work in practice, but that doesn't mean all of it is. And I think that there's, there's the understanding of, well, like how does marketing work? What are the sort of economic aspects? I think they're equally as important to the statistical ones. Marketing in marketing has to compete with the world around us. What creates demand for anything? How does the market change in a good market, bad market, and how does marketing work within those things? Like there is a huge amount of that is part of the theory of marketing that is important. And I think that we. We do need to be better at basic statistical data literacy before we get into the like, am I, uh, you know, data scientist marketer? I don't think that's the problem. I don't think we have to be multi touch attribution, sort of like, like statistical significance. Yeah, that's a helpful thing to understand, but it's much more. Impactful to understand, like, like, are these numbers realistic in the world? Like lead scoring, lead scoring has no mathematical defensibility. Or psychological defensibility. It is, it is, I mean, if you look at it from a purely statistical significance point of view, you're trying to articulate human desire with 10 data points and arbitrarily made up scores. How could you possibly claim that? The entire field of economics has been trying to predict human behavior when massive macro and microeconomic changes occur using data models. And they're still wrong, but we can do it with 10 data points. Two email opens worth 20 points and a website visit. Like, I'm sorry, that's not even statistical data literacy. That's just logic and real understanding of how, how much hubris we have for some of the data that we're building. Phil: Yeah. I think that's expert sailing strategies from MarTech vendors back in the day. And it just became. Table stakes almost, but when I was planning the questions for our interview, um, Intent Data and Why It's Overpromised --- Phil: I know you have a bone to pick with intent data, and I feel like there's a nice transition from lead scoring there that I said we weren't going to go down, but, um, I, I talked about intent data with, with several folks on the show, and I'm always surprised by how many respected marketers are. Big proponents of intent data, at least like this idea of combining first party data with, with third party. Um, but you, like I said, have a bone to pick with intent data providers. And to be fair, like I started focusing more on BTC, like I said, around the time that intent data got really hot. Um, but I just, like, I don't get the appeal and like, I personally, I don't use review sites like G2. Like I couldn't care less about it. I know they give out gift cards to get people to write reviews. Like, it's just like. Not valuable information to me. I could care less. I work remotely. So when I'm browsing vendor sites, they can't reverse my IP to match it to a company name and assume that I was more than like 10 percent accurate in the first place. And none of these tracking tools can be used for people who live in Europe. Like there's a huge lift to making use of any of this intent data and many of the concerns around the implications of turning it into a system. Um, The accuracy is low. The impact this has on deliverability and brand costs, like there's a whole argument around privacy that I know you and I align with, but my favorite quote from the market Tunis is we have to approach marketing with humility. Bad personalization is worse than no personalization. I'm going to give you the stage here. Why do you hate intent data? Liam: I. My biggest problem is that it is grossly overpromising what it's capable of doing. And I think there's two parts. There's the whether or not it's accurate, which is its own problem. There's the whether or not it leads you down a questionable ethical path. Place which you mentioned and I have a real problem with that because what we're trying to do like conceptually it makes sense wouldn't it be great if we could use data to try and infer where people are and who are more or less likely to be trying to purchase a product makes complete sense but it's a very slippery slope that. We're way too easy to pursue, which is exactly like you said. Well, what would be a great proxy? Someone visiting our pricing page? Oh, well, what if we could find out who they are? What if we could uncover their IP? And it's like, okay, well, that feels like we're going against the customer. And we're, we're trying to spy on them. We're trying to take things from them that they're not willingly giving us. And that's not. What marketing is supposed to be doing. Marketing's job is not to hunt people. Its job is to try to create some form of trust with people. And yet things like intent data are leading us down a path of how can I hyper focus on people and spy on them essentially. And I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it starts to have a couple of really big issues. Outcomes that I've seen and I see all the time because we everyone is kind of coming around to this idea now that most people are not in market for your product at any given time and what intent data is somewhat promising is will ignore all those people who aren't and will only shine to the people who are the people who are in market to buy have made a decision already if you're either on the list or you're not. Whether or not you could find out their intent would not make a difference at this point in time. So strategically, it doesn't solve the marketing problem, but it's promising that it can. And then secondly, it's of very little real accuracy when you're at a third party data level. Even at a first party data level, I visit pricing pages. All the time of products. I will never buy. Now you could be uncovering my IP, sending me a LinkedIn DM. You'd be wasting your time because it's not in any way indicative of the way anybody buys. And yet again, it goes back to this idea that we think people are hyper logical, hyper linear and that, well, if you're on a pricing page, you've obviously. Move from the top of the funnel to no, none of that is even remotely true. We are random weird people who do random nosy things for no other reason than I just wanna see what that is. And most of it in truth is in pursuit of what is that product? I should go find out what it is. Okay. I've locked that away in my mind. And then many years later that may come back because it is relevant then. So like we assume that what may be legitimately. Self educating activities like visiting a pricing page are indicators of right now desire, but it's not it's future desire that we are just educating ourselves for. Phil: Hmm. Martech Vendors Trying to Outrun Privacy Legislations --- Phil: Yeah. I feel like there's, there's a whole episode to unpack on these like privacy tools, these shady tools, turning like web visitors into email addresses. I think Brandon Hufford put it best. Like if you visit a pricing page, if I visit your pricing page and then I get an email from you saying like, Hey, like to, do you have any questions? Like it's literally the same thing as if I'm. In a mall in a store, and I'm just like browsing and there's a sales rep just like hounding behind me. Like, Hey, dear, you ready to buy yet? Do you have any questions? Like it's this, I get the same feeling. And yeah, I loved, I loved when Brandon said that. I think I saw it in one of the comments on, on your posts. Liam: Brandon is a good friend of mine. I, that. That comment, it's spot on because it's when you start to look at things that people do in b2b and compare them to an equivalent in the real world of consumer shopping, you start to realize how to be a weird thing to do. Like, that'd be a really creepy way of trying to actually like look at people. And a perfect example of this is that, you know, I get accused of being the sort of like you're being too You know, naive or idealistic when it comes to privacy and stuff like that, everybody does this, you know, every time you go to website, you consent to give away your stuff. Like, firstly, I don't think that's that's an accurate thing. I think that we should, we should, as marketers be you. You know, we shouldn't be skirting around the latest Phil: Hmm. Liam: on privacy. Like if, if your company's basic pitch is, Hey, this product is currently legal in these countries, that's not a great place to be as a, as an organization. Like if you're going, like, it's not allowed over there. Cause they've caught up to the privacy laws. Like maybe that, that says something about what we're trying to do tactically, but. You know, you look at this is there's an old examples of this, like, um, Target was very famous for their incident of using shopper information to infer where people were for other products. And they ended up sending a teenage girl some coupons for, uh, you know, baby stuff in a way that she hadn't told her parents that she was pregnant yet. Was it ethical? Absolutely not. Was it illegal? No. Were they using first party data? Yes. You could say the exact same thing is true, and maybe it's the extreme example, but, you know, maybe it isn't all about secretly trying to spy on and predict what people are doing. Maybe we should just try and give them information to convince them to do so instead. Is Privacy a Political Debate or Should it be Innate? --- Phil: I think that one of the most common counter arguments from these vendors who are creating a software trying to outrun privacy regulations is that like privacy is almost a political debate in the U. S. way more in the U. S. than like the rest of the world. Like Canada, Europe. Like we have legislation for that shit already. It's literally illegal to do it. But like the. They think of it as a political debate because they have all of these followers, these advocates for, for their vendor and their brand. And a lot of these folks say, at least in the comments that, like, they don't care about privacy. Like, if I give away my email. Because I'm on a site somewhere and I get an email asking if I want more information, like it's not the end of the world. Like, I don't really care. What's the big deal. If a company is getting my email, Google is getting my email. Like Facebook is getting all this information around me. Like, and so like they're turning this into a political debate and they're trying to just like. Diminish the importance of privacy because there's a couple poor souls that are like Misunderstanding the whole thing like I have nothing to hide So I don't need to care about privacy like I get I get that argument But I also think it's stupid because you do have stuff to hide like your bank card information Like all of that shit on the internet like you want to just give that out to people I just like it's so, silly to me Liam: I mean, and like, you know, it's so, If you take it to the extreme, it does help the argument. Like you could very much like LinkedIn knows if I'm searching for a job, LinkedIn could sell that information to my employer. Like the ethical lines of what you can do with information is not like just because they can, doesn't mean they should. And I think this whole idea that, you know, no one cares about their privacy. No, I think we've normalized a lot of the fact that everyone's dishonest in this industry, everyone's stealing our information, but wouldn't it be a competitive advantage to be better than that? Like a Phil: Yeah, no, uh, great points there. Um, I didn't promise myself that we wouldn't talk about this, but, uh, here we are chatting about privacy gone down this road with a couple of recent guests and, uh, probably going to do like a mashup of, uh, of privacy stuff. But, uh, I've got two last questions for you, Liam. How to Get Your C-Level To Invest in Customer Studies --- Phil: Um, one of the ones I want to go back on, you mentioned this idea of like brand studies and nobody does it because it doesn't work. Takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. Um, but one of my favorite posts that you wrote was about consumer research and how it's perceived as this like massive investment in only a luxury that very few marketers have. I resonate with us so much. Like every time that I've been given this, like, Projects. Uh, like one example that comes to mind is like when I joined wordpress. com, they had a very poor email onboarding for their like entry level free user created sites, and they wanted to like revamp that like email user onboarding. And, uh, my first question was. What user data do we have, like about their intents? What are they trying to build? Where are the use cases? Like, do we have existing research on that? And there was very little. And so I made this big pitch about, like, a whole market research that we would do surveys going to existing users. And it was shut down because of like, how much time it would take. And Like, I think that one thing that's also true is that marketers aren't necessarily research experts. Some of us are and, um, but most of us aren't. And so often the need, like, for consumer research studies like this is you need the funds. You need the external resources to help you put it all together properly and then analyze it. How can marketers who own KPIs and KRs like traffic and pipeline and revenue, convince leadership to invest in research that is probably costly and might not bear fruit until much further down the line. Liam: couple of answers on this, I think, cause it's. I do agree, like, you know, I think Mark Ritter said this before that any, any research is better than no research, so it doesn't even have to be expensive, massively conducted studies, a couple of conversations with a few clients that marketing did itself are more valuable than anything else, and I think the, a lot of this is framing, because I think the, while Market research might be expensive, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on paid media based on an assumption can be much more expensive than that. So the research is expensive. is to improve the accuracy of the decisions, and therefore it is in pursuit of what should be a better return overall. Now, that's one argument. The other argument is, the reason I love the four Ps, and the reason I advocate for the four Ps, is because they allow you to Think through the lens of the customer and ask questions that maybe the organization doesn't know the answers to. And I have yet to find an example. And I see this with clients that I work with all the time where I will come in. And the first thing I do is I just ask a whole bunch of questions and I am. I and they are often very surprised and a little embarrassed that they don't have the answers. And no one's at fault for this, it's because we don't take a 4P approach. If you ask the question of, what features matter the most to people when they're buying this? Which are the things that make the decision ultimately? And, uh, That's generally not the same answer as what we as the organization thing. We think the latest thing we've put in is the thing they care about. Oh, the AI sidekick is it though? Because most of the research would say that in most products, there's a default core set of two or three things that actually matter. And the rest of it is interesting, but not the deciding factor. There is also the, how would you like to buy this product? What price do you typically expect this thing to cost? How would you expect to go through a sales process? And so much of that. Is it exposes the lack of the research and insights that you actually have, because the truth is, especially in B2B SaaS, where it's sales led, almost all of our pricing is determined by let's look around at what everybody else charged to charge that most of the sales process is built on how do we control as much of it as we can? How do we get them to fill out a form and get into our pipeline? It's all company centric. And. Market research and voice of customer and all of those things are marketing's job is to understand the audience better than anybody else. They represent the voice of the customer, and you can only do that if you talk to the customer and ask them what matters to them, but all of it is in pursuit of making a better marketing strategy that works more effectively. It's not a luxury, it's the measure twice, cut once aspect. Phil: Love it. Yeah, there's so many jumping off points there and there's so many other topics. I, I noted down in the backup questions area, Liam, this has been a super fun conversation. Really appreciate your time. How to Balance Work and Life and Remain Happy --- Phil: Last question for you. Um, you're a founder recovering in house marketer and amateur filmmaker, also a podcaster and advisor and a writer. You're also a runner and a knitter. One question we ask everyone on the show is, How do you remain happy and successful in your career with all the stuff that you have going on in like in your life? Like how do you balance all of the things you're working on while staying happy? Liam: That's a real existential question. I think I always, you know, I, I actually don't love the advice of like, you know, do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Cause that's absolutely nonsense. I love building this company, but it is hard. And there are days when it is exhausting and I love switching off from it. I think you, the most important thing is balance. I think you, you, There's nothing worse than burning out and because it makes everything more bitter and it can kill really pleasurable things. So I think I, the hardest thing for me is forcing time to go run and to make sure that I actually do have that space and that I do finish at reasonable hours and forgive myself for the, I've only worked another couple of hours. I'd be able to be so much more productive like doesn't work that way. I think my, my biggest, uh, my biggest realization every time I go back to Ireland is how. Much. I embraced the American work ethic and how much everyone I know in Ireland is like, is it's five o'clock. I'm not doing any work past this point. And I don't care if the company's on fire. And I think that the more I. Ruthlessly prioritize switching off and focusing on things that give me stress relief, like going for a run. I am immeasurably happier for it, and it takes real discipline to do that. Phil: Awesome. I wanted to ask you actually lied. This is the last question. You said that you're a knitter. Did you ever knit some of the sweatshirts, the beautiful sweaters that you wear on your videos? Liam: uh, I did not, I, I am not that good of a knitter. I, I can, I can do a mean scarf and I can do a, a solid beanie. And I, my mother's a great knit, my daughter, my mother has knitted my son many, many sweaters. Um, my knitting came from I, it gave me something to do on long flights and it was a great sort of time killer, but, um, no, I've never successfully completed a jumper in my life. Phil: Very cool. Yeah. Folks listening still, uh, aren't aware of what I'm talking about. Um, check out Liam on, on LinkedIn and, uh, he's got beautiful videos along with a lot of his posts shot in a scenic outdoors. And he's always, uh, got a mug of coffee and, uh, usually a nice sweater or jacket there. Liam, thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. It's a Liam: It was, this was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.