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The Growth Wizards Podcast is the playbook for B2B GTM leaders who want smarter, repeatable ways to generate demand and build pipeline. Each episode breaks down how CEOs, CROs, and marketing execs drive growth — from top-of-funnel tactics and AI to thought leadership that converts.
Tanner Green (00:00)
All right, everyone, welcome to another episode of Growth Wizards. We are really excited to have Ed on the show today. Thank you for coming on the show.
Ed (00:09)
Happy to be here. I love doing these things. This is gonna be fun.
Tanner Green (00:11)
Yeah.
Yeah, they're tons of fun. So to start off Ed, tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, where you're from, what you've been up to the last few years and what you're excited about.
Ed (00:20)
Yeah, cool. So I was born in the beginning. I was born in Boulder, Colorado. Grew up professionally along the Front Range in in Colorado, in Boulder in Denver. Started my career at IBM in the marketing department after I graduated from from MBA school in Colorado with a dual degree in finance and marketing. And it was right after the dot com bubble burst. And so I had one offer coming out of school and it was to join marketing at IBM.
So I took it and sort of serendipitous. I don't think I would have chosen that if I had other options, but I'm really glad that it happened that way. Because I've had a really interesting journey being a B2B marketer for the last twenty or so years, at the largest of the large IBM, all the way down to thirty million dollar private equity scale ups, and everything in between. So it's been a really interesting journey. I came up through Demand Gen.
And I've now led the marketing organization at the last three companies that I've been at, primarily private equity backed scale-ups, trying to do exactly that, right? Which is they they had a a charismatic founder or a really good idea. It got them a certain distance. And then the old axiom, you know, what got us here isn't gonna get us there. And so new investors come in and they bring a certain level of impatience and desire for growth.
And that's sort of where I come in, working with existing teams, building processes, building new teams, standing up different functions and helping those companies realize their full potential.
Tanner Green (01:47)
I love
it. I think that's such a key role and so important so that companies don't just crash and burn because like you said, there's a lot of really I'm gonna say persuasive founders and a lot of really good product ideas, but the execution level sometimes can fall behind and it just turns into kind of a mess. And
Ed (02:10)
Okay.
Tanner Green (02:11)
I'm sure you've seen that many times over. So
Ed (02:13)
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean it's kinda my it's kinda my bag actually. I mean so the as starting at IBM, you know, three hundred and fifty thousand employees when I joined. And so to get a pencil from supply required like five steps. Like so because you just needed all of that process to guide that many people to make sure you're kinda all moving in the same direction. And then as I moved down the food chain
To progressively smaller companies, I always found myself parachuting into a situation, be geez, I wish I'd been here five years ago. Because some of the decisions that were made, with the best of intentions with the information that they had at hand, kind of went sideways. And so to be able to bring that perspective of this is what good looks like at this level to that next level down, is sort of where I've built my little niche. And your point about, you know, it
There's lots of good ideas, but the execution is where sort of the rubber meets the road. I I was I don't know why I was surprised by this, but not long ago I was just looking at stats and you know, startup starting a company to getting to like ten million dollars, the success rate is minuscule. Right. And then to go
Tanner Green (03:16)
so
Ed (03:16)
from ten to say fifty, it's still minuscule. Like you there's the success bias here, okay, here are the companies that have made it, but here are the two hundred thousand that started and and just flamed out.
And then to get to a hundred is crazy hard. And that it's again, it's it's like two percent of companies that make it to like thirty or forty million get to a hundred.
Tanner Green (03:40)
Yeah.
Ed (03:40)
and when you think about that and and the difficulty, and it's because you you build up habits, things that made you successful don't work anymore, they don't scale. And that's kind of where I've really enjoyed, you know, putting my brain power such as it is to work.
to try to help these companies, you know, get over some of those humps.
Tanner Green (03:57)
Yeah, it is like everyone says I've everyone heard hears this stat. I don't know where it comes from. I think it's just lore, but it's like nine out of ten businesses fail, you know. And I think that can be true, but if you look at the stats as far as revenue goes, that's probably to like maybe a hundred thousand dollars, you know, to get to a spot of of annual revenue for the company, not just the person.
To get nine out of ten businesses that fail. And then to a million, it's probably ninety-nine out of a hundred. And then to ten million, it's
Ed (04:30)
Yeah.
Tanner Green (04:32)
nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand. And it's like, you know, it's just you keep exponentially getting every order of magnitude of revenue you grow is just an order of magnitude harder.
Ed (04:43)
Yeah,
it's painful. Like people say don't start a restaurant 'cause they all fail. Don't start a tech company either. I guess your odds aren't a lot better. Yeah.
Tanner Green (04:49)
Yeah, seriously. Yeah. I seriously you probably have a better shot at starting a restaurant than you do in the tech company these days.
Man, it is crazy. So I wanted to move on to the bit of news. I thought you might enjoy this this this kind of release from MarTech research that was done in August twenty-first. And it says that only forty-nine percent
Of B2B marketers fully trust the data shaping their budgets. So essentially the attribution, the dollar spend going to wherever you're putting in your is hard to tell where it's coming from, where it's going, and what is causing the success. And so I wanted to get your thoughts on creating those
What you think about that stat, first of all, do you agree with it? And then second, where do you see the dissonance?
Ed (05:42)
Yeah. I would answer that by saying, what's wrong with the fifty-one percent who believe they know what's happening? Like like
Tanner Green (05:49)
Yeah.
Ed (05:51)
what and and this is kind of interesting. This has been a pivot in my own trajectory, I would say over the last three or four years, maybe maybe five if I'm being generous to myself. I used to be the guy that would say a hundred thousand dollars in is one point two million dollars out five point six months later. Right. And and I believed it.
Look, here's the money that we spent, here's the pipeline that we generated and the close rates and this is it. And I would drank the Kool-Aid on multi-touch attribution and and all of the tech that sprang up around that. And you know, marketers can be forgiven a little bit for their desperate desire to have something like that at the table, because you can discount an investment on a factory.
From a sales perspective, you know how much a new rep costs and you know what their quota is, and that math is kinda easy and and things like that. And so investments across the organization largely have had hard math to support the return on those dollars. So marketers, you know, we spent the first thirty, forty years of the discipline waving our hands saying, This is gonna be big. Like you gotta trust me, this is gonna be awesome.
And then we sort of discovered this multi-touch attribution and the digital channels, and we thought, hallelujah, we're at the table now, and I can say, give me $100,000 and I'll give you $1.2 million five point six months later. And it was all crap. It was built on a number of faulty assumptions. It was built on this insanely arrogant belief that we as marketers could trigger a purchase of seven figures.
By sending a carefully curated sequence of emails. Or if somebody visited the pricing page, they were ready to make a decision. Right. And so we would weight a visit to the pricing page. Well, that that earned them nine points. And if you get over 50 points, you go into the funnel and you're a marketing qualified lead. And it was just, it was, you know, it made sense logically on paper. It it looked good.
But when you think about how people actually buy, if you go get a haircut or you go buy a car and you're living your life the next week and you get a coupon or and you see an ad for a car, are you gonna go get a haircut tomorrow? No. Are you gonna buy another car? No, you just bought one. You buy a car when you hit that category entry point that says, My current status is no longer affordable. I can no longer afford to live the way that I'm living.
Maybe your engine blew up, maybe you won the lottery, maybe whatever it is, but something triggered your mind to say the situation has to change. And that had absolutely nothing to do with any email or advertising you saw. Then where I'm at right now, we do fee and billing and advisor compensation for tier one financial institutions for wealth management. So they charge their customers and if they overcharge their customers, they can get fined by the SEC.
That's a category entry point. When the auditors show up at your door and they say, You guys have been overcharging your customers for the last six months, here's a $30 million fine, and here's the cost associated with remediating the system so you no longer are are doing that to your customers, that's a category entry point. And the only thing, marketing's only function, is to be top of mind when somebody hits that category entry point. So when your
Tanner Green (09:05)
Mm.
Ed (09:05)
car gets smashed, category entry point.
All of those ads that they've had in the running during your sports or your movies or TV, whatever, you're like, I like Subarus or I like BMWs. So that's at the category entry point, you go and you choose from that subset of brands that's in your head in that moment. And if you're not in that moment, the math is crazy hard. You have a chance of so I forget the stats exactly, but basically for every B2B tech sale, 50% of them end up in no decision.
The risk of change doesn't outweigh the benefit, the perceived benefits of that change. Of the remaining 50%, one in five, so 20% of that, or four of those five, go with the ultimate purchases made with the brand that's in their head, one of the brands that's in their head at the category entry point. So those three or four brands that they know and have associated with that problem. If you're coming late to that party, you have a one in five chance of 50% of what is that, one in
It's like 10%, where
Tanner Green (10:05)
Yeah.
Ed (10:05)
you have a chance of hijacking that deal. And so as a B2B marketer, if you are waiting for your ability to hit them with an email at the exact right time or send them an invitation to a webinar or meet them at an event, you have a five percent chance of getting them at that time. So take a take your TAM, divide it by 20. That's who you're fighting for. And so this notion
That marketers have this insanely high confidence that they know the dollars that they're spending are actually yielding results is crazy because the money that you have to spend in order to be one of those brands, top of mind at the category entry point, is impossible to measure. It just is. And
Tanner Green (10:47)
Hm. Yeah.
Ed (10:48)
so there's the online communities where vice presidents of finance are talking to each other all the time. There are the ads that they see.
The out of home that they see the billboards when they're driving their car. They're watching Friends and Neighbors on Apple TV and there's an ad during that. There's no direct link. There's no click, there's no call to action. But you're building awareness, credibility, and trust, seeding that in their head. So when they hit that category entry point, your brand is top of mind. And again, this is a pivot that I've made recently. And the last job that I took,
I changed everything that I personally had been doing for the last ten years. And I can remember the conversations I was having with my agency at the time about the ad strategy and how we're gonna do that. And they're like, Well, how much of this do you wanna do performance wise? And I'm like, Zero right now. Like for a number of reasons. We had an awareness problem in the United States because we're a Canadian company and we're breaking in. And they're like, Well, you're not gonna get any clicks and I'm like, Don't want it. And their eyes were like, Whoa?
They didn't they didn't understand what I was doing. And I'm like, look, this is a six to nine month journey. We have some some awareness debt that we need to retire. I went to my CEO and my president and I'm like, look, this is happening. This is what's gonna this is what's gonna take some time. It's a two to three quarter investment. We're gonna make it. And literally like nine months and twenty two days or something since we turned on the ads, we got our first inbound.
And it was not the first inbound in the history of the company, but it was the first one that we had done on purpose. And a year ago today, we were doing zero pipeline in inbound. And we didn't even really know what our investments were yielding at all because the measurement systems were pretty janky. That was a year ago. The last two months, we're doing a million in pipeline a month. And
Tanner Green (12:31)
Wow.
Ed (12:32)
a lot of that, it's like 80% of that.
is inbound. We had two inbound people complete a form from our top five on our target list of those accounts that we want to get in. And this is tier one global financial institutions. This is not mom and pop down the street. And when I when I told the president and our our chief revenue officer that JPMorgan filled out form, they were like, what? How do I get this this is how it works. But I could not tell you
Back then, when, exactly how, or calculate a specific ROI on that investment spend, you just kind of have to have faith that this is how it works. And I think B2B marketers again thought that they were somehow immune to the fundamentals of the discipline, which is category entry points, awareness, credibility, and trust, top of mind when the current situation becomes unaffordable. And that's true if you're buying a candy bar to buying a $20 million piece of software.
and that is why I say what's wrong with the fifty-one percent. Two years ago, I'll bet you that number would have been 60, 65% of marketers believe they understood what things were happening. So the tide is changing. And people are starting to shift. And now with AI where it's easy to absolutely spam the hell out of the universe with your message, people are understanding the power of brand.
And being top of mind at that category entry point, maybe a little bit faster than it used to.
Tanner Green (13:56)
So when you're saying, you know, I really like that because I was actually in Europe a few months ago and a lot of the waiters and waitresses would be standing outside when it's like dinner time, you know, and when people are looking around, they're trying to figure out where they want to eat, then those people come in and say, Hey, come eat here's what we got.
And that's kind of what you're saying in like a short sense of being the person in the entryway when on the entry points, which I like the entry points, when they're ready to walk through the door, you know, you're at the front door greeting them before anybody else. And you're making sure that you can treat them exactly the way they need to be treated because you know how they work, you know what they need, you know when they need it.
And then on the second part of the what I really like about there is a direct correlation now with the content that people produce in a sense of maybe not like short reels and doing all that stuff, but real content that provides value for your ice ideal customer. And so
I really like putting those all together in a long term, nine to twelve month process that's gonna take a while to really nail it down, but eventually it leads to inbound leads. People saying, Hey, I've seen this, I know what you're doing, I have this problem, I need to figure it out, you know, and so I I really like what you're talking about there. Yeah.
Ed (15:24)
Yeah, I mean it's it's cool
because this was the first time that I'd actually done it the way that this this sort of new process that I thought I had learned and and so when it happened literally exactly on schedule, I kinda got the chills a little bit. I'm like, hey, maybe maybe
Tanner Green (15:37)
Yeah. Yes, yeah, I bet.
Ed (15:39)
maybe maybe maybe this maybe there's something to this.
Tanner Green (15:42)
Yeah.
Ed (15:43)
but you said something which is really interesting in there, which is is understanding your customer.
And again, I think marketers, particularly in the B2B tech space, often thought it was good enough to be good at their craft. And they really didn't have to understand the lives of their customers. Because again, we had this insane belief that sending the next email is is this magic accelerant. And what I've found is that the key to the credibility part and the key to the trust part is that you truly do understand their pain. So again, in our example,
If they're using their existing systems, every quarter all the bills go out. And the week before those bills go out is a nightmare for let's just say the VP of operations, right? They have to work twenty hours a week, all these manual workarounds. There's processes that literally only one person in the whole bank knows why they do it that way and how to do it. And that person's on vacation this so you gotta call and it's and it's bananas. And so when you are building the content.
You can actually use that as a content. Like, how'd you like to get your your evenings and weekends back? Like that is not, hey, click here to learn how to save $10 million for your organization. It's you can coach your son or daughter's Little League game, coach again, their their team again. And when you make that emotional connection with the buying committee, and I'll tell you what AI is really good at, it's personalizing that message.
By persona, where before you had to handwrite or or work with an agency or whatever and develop 38 different versions of this message, hey, I can do that now in like three minutes. But unless you know that the VP of operations hates their life one week a quarter, and why? And you're not infusing that personalized message to the VP of Operations whose end of quarter is very different.
Than the CFO, who knows they have a board meeting in two weeks, and he has zero confidence in the forecast. That's a very different emotional state than I can't coach my son's team or my daughter's team. But it stems from the same problem. So
Tanner Green (17:52)
Yeah.
Ed (17:53)
building that credibility and trust requires a level of empathy that I think most marketers don't take the time to really really care about.
Tanner Green (18:04)
Yeah.
Ed (18:04)
and
if you have those two things, if you understand your customers and you're empathetic and you're solving personal pain, everybody makes decisions through their lens. Nobody is a completely neutral steward of the business. And people make decisions based on their gut and you can or emotions, and then they look for data to justify them so they don't look stupid. So if you are connecting with them.
And they're like, yeah, don't want my life to suck one week a quarter anymore. And they start lobbying for you, they're not gonna go to their boss and say, My life is shit every like every one week a quarter. What I
Tanner Green (18:38)
Yeah.
Ed (18:39)
want is, hey, I can save us ten million dollars. And most of that is ninety percent profit, which adds to the EBITDA line, which is gonna make the CFO happy. And then the VP or the the the head of operations goes to the CFO and says, Hey, guess what? I can add ten points to the to the EBITDA line. Everybody's in love with it, but it's because somebody's life was terrible.
one week a quarter. And that's
Tanner Green (18:59)
Yeah.
Ed (19:00)
what got them to connect with you. And then that's what triggers top of mind. And then when somebody decides we have to do something, hey, let's talk to PureFacts or let's talk to whoever to solve this problem.
Tanner Green (19:11)
Yeah, I love it. So what are some of those implications that you put into practice to be able to get there? You know, like to understand your customer, to be top of mind, to be with there when they're at the entryway.
Ed (19:22)
Yeah, there's no shortcut. I mean, I'm fortunate where I'm at that our chief strategy officer has this has been his life's work for like twenty-five years, and he's got a really big brain. He absolutely understands the intricacies of the process, whether you are an independent broker dealer with twenty-five advisors to a tier one bank with fifteen thousand advisors. He understands intimately the process, the technology, the workflows.
How many of those banks are actually running their processes again with Dave down in the basement on a spreadsheet? And if Dave isn't there, the whole thing crack crumbles. We have a name, it's called key man risk. Like the it happens
Tanner Green (20:02)
Yeah.
Ed (20:03)
often enough that there's a name for it. And so I have the benefit of being able to tap into that whenever I need it. having
said that, and there is no shortcut to it, and AI can't give it to you. You just you have to spend the time talking to people.
Talking to your prospects, talking to your customers, you know, I encourage everybody send everybody has an events team and it's usually the marketing who's running the event. There's a couple of salespeople and maybe there's an executive to walk the floor. I would it I would send someone from the marketing team to an event who has no business about, you know, trying to capture leads, but is talking to people on the floor. How do you live your life? What do you hate about your job? What's the best part about your job? You know.
Really getting putting yourself in their shoes to understand their pain is the only way to get that credibility because without it, you know, and and we learned this. So when we when I first arrived, we were pushing a message around 10 bps can can be 10 million dollars. Ten million dollars, everybody cares about 10 million dollars, but it wasn't enough to get them moving.
Yeah, if I can save $10 million during a process I'm already doing, of course. Am I gonna risk my current status and operations for $10 million? No. But again, when you go to that VP of operations and you say, I can make your life measurably better, all of a sudden they're an advocate internally. And then that $10 million is the thing that they use, but it's more, it's coming from the inside, and so that works. So th that's a long answer. The short answer is there is no shortcut. You just have to talk to people.
Prospects, customers. And you have to really hear what they're saying and not be afraid to have an honest conversation. Because they're gonna be guarded, right? Nobody's gonna say, yeah, my my life is crap one week a quarter and I want to fix that. Tell me about the the quarter close process. What does that usually entail? Does that take extra time? Does it, you know, is it is it automated? Do you are you personally, what does that do for you?
And that stuff comes out because people like to talk about themselves and people like to commiserate and people like to share how much they are a hero in their job. And it doesn't take, you know, a rocket scientist feel to translate that into, okay, at the end of the quarter this person's life is is not good.
Tanner Green (22:18)
Yeah. And then and relating to them and saying, Hey, there's a lot of people that struggle out there that are just like you. And this may not be you, but there are people out there. So if this is you, then you're in the right spot. Like you're not alone and you are the hero and you're you're you we have a solution. So it like and once they finally like once it clicks for them, like, this is a no brainer.
Ed (22:42)
Yeah, I mean and and in the we say this a lot and it's true where we're at and it it is probably more true by degree, depending on the size of the investment and and what you're actually selling. but it is sorry, I just lost my my train of thought.
Gone. Sorry. Yeah,
Tanner Green (22:59)
Yeah. Got a little something got a little crash. I heard something over there.
Ed (23:04)
there's a a a cascade of glasses avalanching in the in the kitchen right now. the the joy of cats.
Tanner Green (23:09)
That's hilarious.
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah, yep. They always that always happens. They know they know when it's about they know when it's about done. So we are
Ed (23:18)
Yeah, when it's when there's you know when it's important.
Tanner Green (23:21)
Yeah, yeah. Well, we're coming up on time at and I just wanted to get one last thought for ya from you. What are you planning on doing with your team with with AI or already working on to to make
Ed (23:34)
Yeah.
Tanner Green (23:35)
Your process and your job and your team better.
Ed (23:38)
So this is is maybe the most exciting thing that's happened in my career. So what what I have what we're building it at my company right now, my company, the company I work at, is an AI native intelligence layer that sits on top of the entire go to market. And we're calling this system Symphony. And it started as, and I alluded to it before, it started as a machine that could customize all of our messaging by persona.
at scale. So again, going back to the example that I used, if a big bank gets fined by the SEC $30 million, that's a category entry point for that bank, but it's also everybody else in the industry sees that that notice on the SEC homepage. Right. And so that's category entry point for everybody. Because every other bank that didn't just get that goes to their operations person the next day and says, are we exposed? Like is this is or or or is this something that could happen to us? Then the answer often is I don't know. Right? And so
That's what we built the the first version of Symphony to do. And it's it comes in five parts. There's this always listening on there's a always-on listening array. So we're scraping the website, we're using our own first party data, we're using partner data, we're putting all this stuff into this warehouse. We have an insight engine, which based we've trained it to say, okay, here's our TAM, here's here's the type of organization that we care about, here are the personas that we care about.
go into this constantly evolving database and pull out insights that are appropriate or applicable to these personas within this TAM. And so all that's automated. So it feels like it's sentient and it's like doing it's it's not, of course. We're just we're just doing some timed searches and some repeatable prompts and things like that. But we're pulling this stuff out. Then we connected that to a content factory, which creates social media content, email sequences.
Web page content, blog posts, white papers, all of those things automated. So we heard about something. Here's an idea. We created these 47 assets automatically. We send an email to the sellers, the CSMs, and the marketing team to say on Monday morning, this happened last weekend. Here's the assets, here's an email sequence, here's who you should send it to. Here's where the human step is. Our sellers can suppress it against certain accounts, or they can just hit yes, send, send it out.
And then we've we're connecting it to our distribution network. So all of that would be largely automated with two spots where humans are intervening. A, is it good idea? And B, do you want to send it? But other than that, it's completely autonomous. And so we are building this engine from a marketing perspective that allows us to do personalization at scale. And I'm old enough to have been around when mail merge meant personalization. And now we're like we're talking about real honest to goodness.
Personalization at the individual level. And we have causality because within this engine, we understand here's all the tactics that went out, here's the impact of those tactics on the pipeline. And then you can do you know linear, multivariate linear regression to understand what is the R squared value around the propensity to move that prospect to the next stage in the sales cycle. So over time, we will be able to focus our investments on things that are actually moving the needle.
And so that's what Symphony was from a marketing perspective. And then in building this thing, people kind of got wind of it. The CSMs want to use it to do account plans and to better serve their existing customers. The finance team wants to automate a bunch of the reports that they've been doing manually for forever. The technology team and the product team see a vision where we're we're soliciting product feedback.
from our existing customers and putting it into there and then analyzing it and then sending it to the product managers or the product owners or whatever appropriate. So as we've built this engine, people are springing up all over the the organization saying, my gosh, this could really fundamentally make my life better. And so it's been really super exciting to be able to develop this. We have a very small team. We're three people in marketing. And we are serving the entire organization with this this AI native layer.
that is fundamentally changing how our company operates and it's generating all kinds of operational savings. We're incurring some additional costs, tokens, models, you know, storage and things like that. But the trade-off is is unbelievable. And then from a marketing perspective, I haven't turned everything on on that thing, but by the end of this year, we will have what I described fully operational. And so I've I've managed teams as many as 35 people.
And I'm doing more today with Symphony and three people than I was doing with thirty five. It's it's nuts.
Tanner Green (28:15)
Amazing.
Ed (28:17)
It is crazy insane.
Tanner Green (28:19)
Yeah, that's fantastic. Well well Ed, this is so awesome. I love it. Unfortunately we're out of time. We'd love to chat more about Symphony. It sounds really cool, but maybe in the next episode when we have you on again. And how can people go find you and connect with you?
Ed (28:32)
Yeah, so like everybody else on LinkedIn, Locher, L O C H E R, I if you if you're interested, I I wrote a book. It's called... my gosh, I'm having a trouble. It's Digital Transformation, People Processes and... People, Process and Technology. It's available on on Amazon. Or they can, you know, just a good old fashioned LinkedIn message connection and email address is elocher13 at gmail.com.
Always happy to talk about interesting stuff, whether that's Symphony related or or marketing related or if I can help I'd love to serve. So feel free to reach out.
Tanner Green (29:05)
Amazing.
Awesome. Ed, thanks so much for coming on the show and thanks to the listeners for tuning in.
Ed (29:12)
All right, thank you very much. This is great.