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The Factory Floor is hosted by the three co-founders of Conversion Factory, the marketing agency at the forefront of SaaS growth, marketing, and tech trends. Episodes are released on Twitter one day early, @coreyhainesco.
Every other week Corey, Zach, and Nick break down what’s working right now in SaaS marketing, share real-world lessons from the field, and give you the strategies you need to outpace the competition.
You can also find us on YouTube, X, and everywhere you listen to podcasts!
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Alright. Queue us up, Nick.
Okay. Sweet. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the factory floor where we talk about everything we want to, and you listen. We are gonna go through a quote that we have from LinkedIn from someone that we all follow semi closely. His name is Pep Laha.
Okay? So I'll just read it out for you, and then we'll kinda go through some of the the major bullet points. And we're just gonna kinda, like, dissect and cut this into pieces. But first, let's introduce ourselves. We have Zach Stevens.
Zach, how are doing?
I'm fantastic, Nick.
Pleasure What be
did you just get in the mail?
I got my brand new laptop, which I'm super stoked about. Because now all my insanely layered Sigma files are gonna load at the speed of light, we hope. I won't
get Good. Okay.
I won't get cut off in my Loom videos anymore. So I'm really looking forward to it.
That's great. Fantastic. And then we have Corey Hanes. Corey, how are you?
Kinda itchy, to be honest. Have like a chemical burn from a Jacuzzi, and it makes my like thighs really itchy.
Okay.
TMI.
Is there anything we could do No. To help
And there was even if even if there even if there was something that we could help with, the fact that he confessed to having a chemical burn itch on our podcast, I'm not gonna help him. You're gonna have to sit here and suffer through that.
I hope this is the one with the most views and tons of people know about your chemical burn. Okay. Let's keep going.
As long as they don't know that it's herpes. That's the most important part.
Right. Yeah. We won't talk. We'll just That's the least. We won't say that.
That one's the least bad.
Yeah. And then my name is Nick Loudon. I'm doing great. Thanks for asking. So let's get into this this post from Pep, and I'll just read it real quick.
It says, I surveyed 50 b to b SaaS CMOs from 50,000,000 to to 1,000,000,000 plus in revenue, and their most pressing marketing issues right now on their most pressing marketing issues right now. Sorry. The response was brutal. They're spending more to acquire worse customers, and here are the top three issues. And then he rattles through the top three, which are increasing customer acquisition costs, number one, pipeline development challenges, number two, and need for brand and marketing differentiation, number three.
So I figured we'll start with number one and just kinda, like, give a little bit of lay of the land. This is the first one, so I'm assuming it's the most important. But that's increasing customer acquisition costs. Corey, know you do the the SaaS marketing summit, right, where you collect all those surveys and these things. I'm curious if you felt as though I know these are, you know, different levels of companies and things like that.
If you felt as though this was all true.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I think it's spot on. I mean, to be honest, it's funny because you look at the top three reasons, and it's all pointing back to, like, marketing is really hard and keeps getting harder. So, like, these are all the reasons why marketing is hard and keeps getting harder.
So it's not really super surprising. On the status ass marketing survey, I think that we saw, you know, definitely the the companies that indexed are in a much smaller scale. They're usually in like the half a million to $5,000,000 in the ARR kind of range. But really, like, that shouldn't change anything at all because everyone's experiencing all the same problems, especially increasing customer acquisition costs, CAC. And I I I mean, it's interesting that we keep seeing this because marketing was supposed to get easier over time because it's like, oh, AI makes everything way easier.
Like, you can do more for less and everything's so scalable and the ad platforms are so good. But what I think it comes down to is competition. Yeah. Every time the competition goes up, customer acquisition costs are also gonna go up because you're it's it's kind of a it's driving everything out. There's market economics of like, where there's more people fighting for the same finite number of people's attention, then the the bidding goes up for how much you can pay to acquire that person's attention.
Yeah. Yeah. That's an interest so I think that the the sheer mass of it's interesting how number one and number three are greatly intertwined with one another. But maybe we'll talk about that once we get to number three. I was listening to a podcast with Greg McEwen, who who wrote the book Essentialism.
And they were kind of breaking down just like the era that we're in as far as, like, innovation goes. So, you know, you can think back to, like, stone age, then you have the industrial revolution, then you have the information age, which is what we were in up until about this point. And what they're speculating now is they're actually in the influencer age. And that's to circumvent the fact that information became so widely accessible that now you it's not about a limited amount of options, it's about an excessive amount of options. So the choice paradox is what's coming into play here, where people have way too many options and they feel like there's so many things for them to choose from.
It's like they walked into Baskin Robbins, and instead of 31 flavors, there's as many flavors as they could ever want. And there's no possible way for them to discern which one is actually gonna be the best fit for them at a service level, at least not without being able to try it or to having something that's a really strong emotional connection to something that already exists. You know, like, well, I'm gonna choose pistachio because that's the flavor that my dad always got. And that's a more subjective reason as opposed to a factual like, well, this flavor is objectively better than the other ones that I could choose from. And I think the same thing applies to software companies.
It's like, they're not objectively better. They're subjectively better between one another, which is makes the decision even harder.
Both of you brought up competition and like that's like kind of the crux of like, okay, there's all these competitors. Is there so many more competitors because building products like this or products in whatever spaces has gotten way easier? Is that the main reason why it's like, okay. Now there's, you know, instead of three big players in a specific niche of an industry, there's 25 or a 100. Is it because people have figured out like, hey.
It's not like that hard to set up a business with a Stripe account and to hire a developer and do this for three months and then have a product. Like, it's not that crazy to go and do that.
Mhmm. Yeah. I think it's ease. But I also think this is just what happens when a market becomes mature. The SaaS market is maybe, like, coming to be around twenty years old now.
I think it was like the mid two thousands to, like, the maybe, like, 2010 was probably, like, the pivot point where b to b SaaS really became an established category. And then everybody started jumping on this opportunity to recreate all the manual, you know, pen and paper and spreadsheet processes into dedicated software platforms. A lot of funding followed that from VC. A lot of entrepreneurs jumped into the space. A lot of people decided to innovate.
And now, like Zach mentioned, we just have a plethora of options. And we've kind of we've kind of filled every gap that we need to essentially, like, the the essential gaps in the market for what software should exist. Right? And so now every new incremental company that's created to solve this existing solved problem just makes it harder and harder for everybody else in that existing category to acquire the same customers. So to me, it's it's like this is a mature market.
I think the AI and in this next wave will kind of like reshift everything a bit. But at the same time, like if you look at other industries that are a lot older, like, I don't know, oil or energy or phones, hardware, etcetera etcetera. Like, there was I think that Apple Apple talked about this maybe in like 2019 or 2020 where they felt like everybody who should have a phone has a phone now. So now, like, the market is just split between Apple users and, like, Google slash Android users. A similar thing maybe in SaaS, where it's like, everybody that should have all these software platforms now has their software stack, and now we're more fighting to replace software versus software for the first time.
Mhmm.
Yeah. In some well, it's just, I think that maybe they're just not as big anymore. You know, like, you're not gonna have that opportunity to create the the kind of platform that can scale across multiple markets that is going to be that dominating thing. It's gonna be way more granular as far as the decision that you make is and which platform you choose. Like, I mean, we see this all the time with people even trying to switch between web platforms.
You know, like, Webflow is has very good use cases for the types of people that we work with, which are SaaS companies who don't necessarily have a lot of e commerce requirements. They really seem to be able to pump out content fast and send and have it be designed really well. But then you have things like Squarespace or like there's this other one that I think it was like ybuild or something like that. Or Wix or all those other platforms. And the reason that you choose those aren't because they're objectively better or because they they solve a like, solve a problem that you don't have a solution to.
You have multiple solutions to it. You just it's gonna be one that's like partial to you. So the granularity of like, how can I niche down maybe even further and that way acquire more of the market? I think that that's what is like, what we're gonna be seeing now even more. Like, I've always thought of this idea of like, well, what if there was a accounting software specifically for tattoo shops?
You know, because like tattoo shops have very specific things that they always keep track of. Or even like guitar guitar shops or just you know things that like, we made this specifically for you. And yeah, there's not as many people in that market. But if we're going to try and acquire more market share and become something that's irreplaceable, we're gonna have to rely on those more subjective features as opposed to something that's objectively better across multiple markets.
Mhmm. Okay. So what I'd like to do is for each of these three, like, give like a, hey, if you're facing this, like, here's a little nugget or something like, maybe
Let's
we try this this move. Like, if you're one of these 50 b to b SaaS CMOs, which and you listen to this, that would be awesome. No. I'm just kidding. Or if you're anyone experiencing any of these issues, like, can we give them a, like, at least a little bit of that that prescription or that remedy of, okay, what would you do?
What's a little practical step that they could take to move through and deal with something like increasing customer acquisition costs?
May I create a spring word for this that Corey can riff off of?
Go for it.
So one of the things that we talk about very frequently is that ads aren't really the problem anymore. It's gonna be where are people going after the ads. This is this might not necessarily be the case for these larger companies. Although, we've seen some pretty egregious landing pages from very very well funded and
Oh, yeah.
Profitable profitable companies. But it seems to be that the ads aren't necessarily the problem. And a lot of people put so much money into that top of the funnel, but they neglect the middle of the funnel, specifically their landing page. What do you think about that, Corey?
Yeah. Oh, that's that's totally it. Like, I think that a lot of people have become complacent with putting money in certain places, and then expecting everything else to kind of fall into place as far as conversion rates, and okay, now that people know that we exist, now they should be able to sign up. And it's like, no, not really. Like, you have to you have to do a really good job of convincing them these days.
So just because you got them to your landing page, doesn't mean that they're going to then sign up. We saw this a lot with the advent of free trials, and this is how marketing goes too, is everybody's always looking for a competitive edge. Right? So, you know, back in the day, even with SaaS, it was like, sign up today, start paying us a thousand dollars a year, and then you can get up and running with our software. And that created a decent amount of friction.
Right? So anybody who wanted to disrupt that company or kinda steal their lunch, then started offering something like a free trial. And let people with a free trial started offering freemium. And then everybody with freemium started offering like these concierge migration packages and yeah, different offers and incentives and buying out their competitors contracts. And the friction keeps going lower and lower and lower.
And that's all because the optimizations can't be made in the app ad platforms very much, and you can't really spend your way out of these problems. You really have to take a good hard look at the full funnel all the way from the beginning of the customer journey to the end. And and practically, think that a lot of companies have to think about cutting, trimming the fat out of their marketing. A lot of companies already have, but the point I wanted to make was that sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the meat and the fat. Sometimes people are cutting actually the good parts of their programs that are profitable, and and they really need to be cutting the things that aren't moving the needle at all.
And I can't say what's what for any company. Right? But I'm just saying that that can be hard to distinguish, and you have to make sure that you're cutting the right things.
Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating.
Should we let's go on to number two. I think it was great. Did you have something else, Corey?
Just one more thought. This is more just like a question. I don't know. But one of the other things it makes me think of is, like, what's the relationship between rising customer acquisition costs and economic inflation? Because we saw a lot of inflation in the last five years since COVID.
I would just assume that costs are gonna go up for your cost per click, for your vendors, for your services, you know, SaaS providers do a price increase. You know, the dollar isn't a dollar anymore. Right? And I think that that kind of cascades down to everything. So but I don't know what that relationship is.
So and maybe it's kind of a non factor because that's always been something people have to account for. I don't know. But I just Yeah. Thinking out loud.
The economic impact, there isn't really a whole lot of industries that it doesn't, like, touch or, like, doesn't mess with the the, like, transfer of of goods or services. Like, it's gonna touch a little bit, or it's gonna at least snake its way into like, oh, well, now we should probably raise our price or else we can't, you know, cover these other costs of PPC or whatever. It's interesting.
Right. Yeah. I guess the only the other point to sit on that is like, I don't know if we'll ever see a survey response that's like, oh, customer acquisition costs are going down. Like, cool. It's like, they're probably always gonna go up.
Yeah. They just might go up slower.
Yeah. Right.
Gosh. I can't imagine what it's gonna be like in five years. Check back with us then.
Really bad. Yeah. Keep listening. We'll see you in five years. Time capsule this.
Yeah. Well, let's do number two, which is pipeline development challenges. So kind of what he was saying is CMOs are seeing their tried and true pipeline playbooks fall apart. The budget's limited. It's not clear that even a bigger a bigger budget would even help.
So I guess I wanna get, like, your take. This is kinda like the next step, Right? After, like, okay, it's cost so much more to even, you know, get the leads that we need or get the the new customers. But in the middle there, you have a pipeline of, like, who's coming in, where are they going, how are they getting to the very end. And it's hard to see that development, I guess.
So kinda wanted to see what your guys' thoughts were on I know he gave some of those quotes and things too.
Well, I'm gonna assume that this is more on, like, an enterprise level side, because you wouldn't necessarily I feel like you wouldn't classify people as leads. You you can, but I feel like they're I would just treat them differently if it's like a smaller self serve product versus
the same concept though. Because I mean, freemium or like a product led product led growth business is gonna have a pipeline the same way because they're gonna have like this massive free user base. And then they're gonna have these kind of like leads. Yeah. Yeah.
And then but then they're gonna have another category of those free users that are like leads in the sense that they're showing the positive indicators of potentially becoming a paying user one day. And or a lot of people will look and see, you know, oh, is there any logo that I recognize? Then I can go, like, do outbound sales to these free users, so on and so forth. So like, pipeline, I think, can also accurately describe enterprise and PLD companies.
Sorry. My daughter just walked in. She just went out. Sorry. Okay.
Zach, were you gonna say something?
No. That make that makes sense. I I think that the I mean, when they say that their tried and true playbook is falling apart, I guess it's like, well, why? Like, so what Yeah. What causes something like that has worked for so long to fall apart?
And maybe it's a I don't know. Maybe they aren't thinking through the need to innovate a little bit further. And like, maybe they're just it sounds like it could be something like a product problem where maybe they're not gating the right things. And
Sorry. I was gonna add to what you said. Because in the like in the initial in the beginning of the of his post, it says we're spending more to get worse customers. And in my brain, the pipeline is also, like, the the most value one of the most valuable pieces of it is, like, the determination of, like, what makes a customer a good customer. And, like, the good customers get to the end is kind of the the goal of, like, okay, the pipeline, you know, it's it's ultimately gonna bring these customers in, but it's also, like, making sure that the good ones are, like, seeing the value and ready to click the button at the very end when they get to the bottom of the of the funnel.
You know? So maybe it's related to, like, what types of leads or potential customers get into the pipeline and that they're all not that good. Maybe that's what it was pointing at, but I could be way off. I don't know.
No. I think there's something there for sure. I've I've heard of a lot of sales reps that'll tell me, like, it's rare these days that there's just a lead that comes to the door and it feels like you're playing t ball. It feels like every lead that comes through, like, they're throwing fastballs at you and you're striking out over and over and over again. In other words, the leads are making your life harder.
So the pipeline isn't full of people like, when can I start? It's like they have a entire sheet in front of them where they're interrogating you, and you have to pass all these tests and jump through all these hoops in order to keep going further and further down the sales cycle. So you have to prove a lot more. And that's kind of my suspicion about what people mean when they say that they're tried and true playbooks are are falling apart. There was like, when I started in marketing, we were kinda right in the middle of this shift from like a like spray and pray blasting out direct, you know, cold outreach over email, and that was like the tried and true playbook.
And you had SDRs and AEs, and then it hold this whole process of trying to get leads through, and you're, you know, following up with anybody who downloads an ebook or a white paper, and you're nurturing those leads until they finally give you permission to hop on a call, things like that. Right? That to me just feels like a very, very outdated, obsolete model that a lot of larger, older companies are still trying to rely on. And so there's not much juice left in the lemon and they're still there like, why aren't you why why isn't the juice coming out? And to me, it's just a sign of like, dude, you gotta you gotta change things up.
You gotta shift. You gotta like abandon the playbook. You know what I mean? Like, if this isn't working very well, stop staffing up so many salespeople on the enterprise side of things and start staffing up more engineers, more marketers, more copywriters, more, I don't know, customer success onboarding people. Like, where what is the gap that you can fill where you need to, like, reallocate those resources?
Yeah. Actually, I feel like that might be
a good segue to number three, which is the need for differentiation and brand in marketing. Because if the current playbook is dying, well, what are some of the things that you could do that would separate you and distinguish you from everybody else? So that regardless of what you're like, who comes in the door, they're excited to work with you because of some external factor that isn't necessarily a part of the product, but it's it's more about who you are and that they want to work with you. What you think of that?
I was gonna say, I I think number three is like, it's kinda like the remedy for number two also. Because I know I mentioned we would like, okay, let's solve all these. But I think number three will definitely help. Okay. Here's my, like, high level overview of what like, all there's, you know, there used to be, you know, three big players in the space, and now there's 25 or 50 or a 100.
I
feel like it's it feels to me that there was it used to be that, you know, there was four or five degrees of separation between these people, all these businesses all in the same industry or niche. And now there's, like, point one per degree of separation. It's like they're all, like, we're exactly like this company, but we we also have this one sub feature. It's a little different. And our color scheme is blue.
Like, you know, it's like, let me give you a new color, you know, that kinda thing. And I feel like that and it's just because of like competition and like there's so many people, like, do you differentiate when all the feels like all the ideas are are zapped up. But where I think you're gonna say something.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, when people say that they feel the need to differentiate, what they're saying is potential customers are telling me they don't understand why they they should choose me over my competitors. And so that's like a that's like a symptom. Right?
No one feels like they need to differentiate until people are like, wait, why should I choose you? You sound exactly like these guys over here and those guys over here. And like the thing that I have right now that I'm already paying for. So it's true in the in the sense that like, yeah, you absolutely need crystal clear positioning, copywriting, messaging. You have to have like an angle.
You have to have differentiators that go just beyond just features and also go into service and price and your brand as a whole Mhmm. And kinda like what you're representing. It's it's the service in in general. Right? Software as a service.
So what are all the ingredients of that service and all those points of your service need to be differentiated? But it yeah. Again, it's also like, I think this is what happens in mature markets. People need to niche down, but they're scared to. They're scared to plant their flag somewhere and be like, this is the hill that we're gonna die on because they then they feel like then they're limiting themselves and they're gonna be missing out on future opportunities, but then they're just their signal's getting lost in the noise.
I think there is there's more of a surface level component to it as well. Because I mean, we talked we talked about last week about the or two weeks ago about being copy first versus design first. And one of the things that came up was the trope of homogeneity between all these startups and way they talk, the way that like, personas around these companies all feel very, very, very similar. Especially if you are in a similar market. I feel like, you know, all of the like, the typeface du jour of, you know, those like very goofy humanist typefaces that are kind of extended and have like the the cuts, the ink wells in their their letters.
It's like, yeah yeah. I've seen this before. You get it. You're trying to be human and show that you're not like, you know, some software company in your high tower. But they the thing that sucks about that is that the thing that would help differentiate them the most is if they stop trying to be what they think people want them to be.
And if they took a look at, well, how do we actually communicate internally and present an authentic version of ourselves both in the way we speak and in the way that we present the like our image as a company. And that leads to a lot more cool marketing initiatives like, know, Loops doing cereal boxes and marketing as cereal. You know, like that that's super cool. Or mean, you could think of it's about doing things that are almost more artistic as opposed to like, yeah, this is for sure gonna bring us in a bunch of money. Instead of doing things that are just like, that's cool.
Like, why not do that? Like, that sounds like something that's kinda fun. There it's interesting. There's a pretty clear dynamic or parallel between Hollywood as well. It's like, when when you start making movies to make money, they're not gonna be good movies.
So you have to bring forth that artistic effort, or at least be willing to experiment with it, and it'd be okay with the fact that it might not work right away, but it's gonna be a long term play that we're gonna help differentiate ourselves and show that we are actually different. Like, look at the can anybody else say that they act this way? I don't think so.
Mhmm. Yeah. I think that gets to the point that like positioning and differentiation is super philosophical to a company. It's very it's very existential to a company's existence. Why should I exist?
What do I have to offer that is unique? You see what I mean? Why why do I deserve Yeah. To I mean, it's created me.
I mean, it's the last it's the last question that I asked during the brand strategy stuff. It's like, well, why do you exist? Like, you know, what what do you like, what is the driving force behind you? But then the thing that people fail to recognize about that is that it has trickled down to the way that you build your product and the way that you present your product. It comes down to the features.
A good example is like anybody that has like a a sustainability approach, they're gonna say things like, will we give one percent of all of our profits to, you know, 1% for the 1% for the planet or some of the kind of charity that they actually care about. And what that does is it not only puts proof, like proof of stake of like, no, we actually believe this. Here's tangible proof. But anybody else that also thinks the same way is gonna feel more emotionally connected to you. And those emotional connections are a lot harder to break, and they're a lot harder to replicate.
Whereas anything that has to do with like your prefrontal prefrontal cortex of like, well, this company costs this much. They have these features. They have x y z. Now, you're moving people into this comparison realm where they're having to think too much. But instead, if they loved you, it'd be very hard for them to even think and consider moving away from somebody else.
Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. That that's funny because you said that you end your position or your branding workshop with that question.
And I always start the positioning workshop with that question or basically with a with a preface. And I tell them, hey, this is gonna be uncomfortable, and I'm gonna ask a lot of questions. They're gonna make you, like, basically gonna challenge you, like, why do you exist and what problems does this does your product solve and how does it do it uniquely? And that is hard because so many software companies start as, like, a lab experiment. They're like, I wonder if this approach to solving this problem works even just a little bit.
And then it does, and they keep refining the the experiment, so to speak, and they keep building on their product and taking a very m v MVP approach following the data. And it works, you know, companies get to millions of dollars in ARR, and then they sort of had this like Frankenstein understanding of why customers choose them. They're like, well, some choose us for this reason over here. Some choose us for that reason. I think that we do this really well and maybe everyone has a different opinion.
I remember experiencing this like firsthand being a marketer, talking to our sales team at a past company Who is and trying to lead them through a similar type of workshop where we're trying to gather a bunch of information from the front lines about, hey, why our customer what what are the reasons customers are telling you that they're willing to sign the contract and become a client or a customer of ours? And everybody had different answers, which is is so funny because there should be like a couple of really really clear similar answers, but it just goes to show that everybody interprets things differently. And so you have to be able to take a really deep look into yourself as a company and plant your flat your flag somewhere. But then you also have to get rid of a lot of other stuff and say, oh, we're not gonna focus on this segment. We're not gonna focus on that use case.
We're not going to try to compete up market or we're not gonna try to compete down market, which is uncomfortable always. But that is how you differentiate. Yeah.
You have to be everything for someone, not not everything someone to everything. What am I trying to say? Does that make sense?
I I know what you're saying. Have to be something to someone, not everything to everyone.
Yeah. Or something to everyone. There we go. That was it. Okay.
You need to be everything to someone, not something to everyone. Like just, we do it all. Like this is the AI. This is the AI problem too. Yeah.
Which is like, you go on either sites and it's like, it can do anything?
Everything.
Buy dinner? Like what can't it do? And it's and like the chatbot, if you ask, will be like, sure. Yeah. We could do that.
Like, it's just like everything is done.
What was the movie? The movie type, the everything everywhere all at once? Yeah.
That's Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Big problem.
The Who, everyone.
Every AI company's h one. There's a Nick. Nick, come back to
us. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah. Can you hear me?
Yeah. Did your power die?
Okay. My no. My, like, my power, like, jack down here, that is, like, underneath my desk, fell out. And it all just turned off. That's just That is so funny.
Okay. Well, can like trim it. Right? That that exists?
Michael, trim it.
That, bro. Cut it.
Do it, What
was I saying? I was gonna say it makes me think of iRobot. That's basically it. But like, have you seen iRobot with Will Smith?
Mhmm. We're not the walker. It's what
am I? He's like, and then he like runs away, you know. It's like, that's the Sass is saying, what am I? As Sunny the robot from iRobot. And Will Smith's trying to catch them with his laser gun.
Yeah. It's it's crazy because it does come down to like having a having a motive besides money. Which is tough. Because I think that everybody like, obviously, you need the pragmatism of well, our business has to be funded, and that that funding's gotta come from somewhere we'd prefer if it came from customers. But having a I think having those values and also understanding yourself, like what makes you feel the way that you want other people to feel is a really good source of inspiration.
Because I mean, that's my mantra. Right? Is that the great brands aren't created, they're stolen. What are they stolen from? They're stolen from the things that excite you.
And when you can I feel like it makes it a lot easier to answer the question of like, who do we want to be? It's actually there's a psychological term for it, and I forget exactly what it is. But you actually don't know your own identity. You only see it as a result of I like the way that person acts or the way this person behaves, and I want to adorn part of that on myself. That's why when somebody says something like, you know, oh, Corey, you know, you're so much like Nick in this capacity, then then you have an understanding of how you act.
Because you can't actually see it yourself. It's like the pickle hole in the jar syndrome. You can't read your own label, but you can only see outside. And other people read yours. So if you wanna steal your brand, just think of the things that make you feel the way you want other people to feel, preferably not other software companies.
And think about the things that they do, the way they act, and the mechanisms that make you feel that way. Is it the colors? Is it the way they speak? Is it the actions they take? Is it the the beliefs that they have?
Like, and your inspiration can come from anywhere. My my soapbox rant, which is done now.
Over. And I have stuff down for sure.
I have a
I go ahead. Go ahead.
No. No. Go. You go ahead.
Okay. My turn. Yeah. I was gonna say, I am really glad that this is point number three, and that this is one of the three biggest problems that software companies have because it's like the two like, two of the most important things that we do is that, Corey, you have your positioning workshop and all of this, like, positioning and market differentiation type knowledge. And Zach's, like, intense with branding and, like, how to make this exactly, like, what your, like, what your belief system and everything that, like, started this business, like, turns into a beautiful brand that, like, really sets you apart.
So I'm very glad that this is a major problem for everyone. So thank you guys for having this issue so we can fix it up. Okay. Sorry. Corey, what were you gonna say?
No. I I kinda have a a hot take a little bit that it's funny that marketers and CMOs are saying that they need brand and marketing differentiation because I also feel like it's not just the marketers job to figure out the differentiation and the positioning strategy. I think as a marketer, your job becomes a lot easier when your product team is really, really opinionated and in tune with your customers. And I I'm not like trying to crap on product people or CTOs or anything like that, but engineers have a tendency to be like, oh, yeah. We could be used for this and we could also be used for that.
And like the software can do anything. Because they're purely thinking logically about like, they they know the software so in-depth, They almost think too highly of it. They're like, oh, yeah. You know, we have a WYSIWYG that can be used as like a website builder and or an app builder. And it's like, no, just choose one.
Which one should we do? And so if the product team were to be a lot more opinionated about, no, we think that we can do this best, and they know their competitors, and they can choose that direction for their roadmap, and then the marketers can turn that those opinions into your messaging and into your positioning strategy and then roll that out to your sales team. It becomes a lot easier because then otherwise, you're fighting with your product team all the time. If I really hate as a marketer and doing our workshops with our clients being like, hey, we should plant our flag here and ignore all these other things over there. Because now I'm telling them that like, you can't have those things and you're wrong about wanting those things.
I want them to be like, no, I really want this one thing and I really wanna do this one thing really really well. I'm like, great. We can help you do that. Let's go turn that into the messages that are gonna convert. So anyways, that's my hot take about like, if if marketers want better differentiation, they need their their CPOs and their CTOs to have better differentiation.
Is it a hot take if it's completely correct?
It's
who he's placing It's the blame who he's placing the blame on. Yeah.
Sorry, guys. No one wants to point fingers, but
We're just pointing fingers at everyone else. So there
you go. Gentlemen,
any final thoughts? No. It's solved.
Well, I think my my final takeaway, which I wanna emphasize is to embrace a little bit more artistry. You know, like, if the things that you are used to to doing aren't working anymore, it's gonna hurt a little bit, and you're probably gonna regress a little when you're trying to get these new ventures. But that's okay. Because part of this process and change is art. It's chaos.
Like, you don't know what's going to happen. But you do know what's gonna happen if you try and stick with the status quo and to keep doing what you've been doing, which is not working. So give yourself some permission to experiment and fail a little bit in the hopes that you'll actually come up with something new. Because that like, if you're going to innovate, you are going to create mess. And that's what this problem is.
It's an innovation problem. It's not an efficiency problem. It's an innovation problem. And the lack of willing to take risk to try and do something different.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was just thinking, this might be contrary to everything that I've said previously. But it's okay because these will all be different clips, so no no one will be able to tell. The the thing I was thinking about was sometimes when you try to so for example, if you're if you're like, oh, I we're not getting as many customers, so we should ramp down our marketing.
We should do less marketing because it's not as efficient as we want it to. And sometimes that's actually not the right answer. Sometimes you actually have to turn the dial up and do more things in order to like for things to level out again, essentially. You know, swing harder, make bigger bets, do stranger, more creative marketing stunts, do the artistic chaotic things like like like Zach was mentioning. I don't know if you can really like effectively decrease your customer acquisition costs super well.
Like I said, you can trim the fat if there's like things that obviously aren't working, just reallocate the budget. But if you're like, hey, we're getting less worse customers, so we should turn our marketing down, then you're gonna get even less worse customers. You know what I mean? You need to do better marketing, and sometimes that means spending more for a while to get out of that. Same thing with the pipeline development.
If it's like, man, it's really hard to get these leads to convert into customers, and everyone keeps, you know, moving or keeps dropping off at a certain stage of the onboarding cycle or the sales cycle for whatever reason, that doesn't mean necessarily that you need to like qualify them more or make it harder for them to move through the sales cycle. Sometimes that means that you need to make it even easier and even less qualified people to come through. Because maybe they're not coming the right people aren't coming through the door in the first place because it's so time consuming to do so. Or whatever the reason might be. Right?
Yeah. It sounds a lot like if I had to put a a label on all these, it's doing a little bit of things that don't scale.
Yeah. It's big problem.
Like, you know, because experiments don't scale very well at first. Trying new things doesn't scale very well at first. Maybe going and talking to your customer base doesn't scale very well at first, but it yields compounding benefit down the road. And it it's like just you're gonna have to work a little bit to make it happen.
I like when you said turn the heat up. That makes you think of like a big pot. Like, okay, they have this big marketing pot that they put all these ingredients in and like all this stuff and like, it all kinda boiled down to, like, okay. This is how we do it. We pay for this, and we do this organic, and, you know, like, that is the machine that runs.
And now it's kinda, like, okay, it's dried up. Like, don't turn the like, turn it up again and add a ton more ingredients in and, like, put more water in and, like, boil it, boil it, boil it, and it's gonna, like you know, you need to, like, re reorchestrate this whole, like, boil or cook that you made and get more ingredients, more things to test out. Again, what's gonna boil down to the bottom and actually be the thing that carries your your business forward and refills your pipeline and and lowers all this stuff. That's really interesting. I like that you said turn the heat up and, like, turn this little analogy in my brain on.
But super good. Okay. Thank you for your final thoughts. I thought that was great. I really liked going through all this content today.
And who knows what we'll go through next time. You'll have to stay tuned and find out. Anything else, gentlemen? Good? Happy with everything you said?
I think we're great. Yeah.
No takesie backseats.
Felt felt cute. Felt cute. Might delete later. We'll see.
Okay. Well, thanks for listening to the factory floor, and we will see you guys next time.