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Your go-to digital marketing toolkit: Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders Podcast.
In-depth discussions with leading voices in tech marketing, uncovering the challenges they face and the innovative solutions they're implementing.
Our goal is to provide you with sincere value, perspectives, learnings, and transparent advice you can apply directly to your digital marketing strategy.
This podcast is a proud production of MKG Marketing (https://mkgmarketinginc.com). Our tailored digital marketing strategies for B2B SaaS organizations are transparent and measured: making every impression count.
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Elijah (00:00.662)
Aha. I'll start the intro and then kick it off for you. So behind every one page ranking is someone wrangling five algos at once at Revenues Zen. That's Ken the Magma Marshall. As CGO, he didn't just ride the SEO wave. He rewrote the playbook with GEO turning scrappy SaaS brands into pipeline machines. Today on Tea Time, Ken breaks down why helpful content is the starting line, just the starting line.
and how systems think outracing one-off tactics before the algorithm beat you to it. Ken, this is awesome. You're like the guru in the best sense. I don't usually like gurus, but you're like the goat of GEO. Thanks for hanging.
Elijah, you are prolific in your kindness and thoughtfulness. So I hate the word guru as well, but yeah, we've been having fun experimenting and learning things. So happy to be here.
Right on. I love games. I like having fun as a middle-aged man. I'm internally 12 and I love deaf fun. So if we could do a little Mad Libs marketing, that'd be cool. And I'll just give you a sentence and I'll do it'll sound weird, but for example, in 2026, the biggest blank in B and B will or B to B will be blank. Thanks to blank teams. Do you have any lines that would or words that would fit that line that would
make it sound so sweet.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (01:28.398)
So the biggest unlock in like an area of B2B.
Sure.
I forgot the last two that you said, but the biggest unlock in, yeah, so the biggest unlock in revenue per employee will explode thanks to go-to-market engineering. The ability for people to use two AI tools and automation to augment their existing behavior in order to grow in unique and unusual ways will just sort of, you know, that's going to be 10x over the next few years. It already is starting, but I believe in that.
you pressed...
B2B will blank thanks to blank.
Elijah (02:06.574)
Cool. The fastest way to lose a project is blank blank that refuses to.
The fastest way to lose a project. One more time for me.
What fastest way to lose a project in, me a couple words that refuses to what? So how do you, project is doing something that refuses to something. She got some.
way to lose a prospect.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (02:31.818)
is
you don't lose prospects so you don't really know how to answer this. That's a problem.
asking to poorly send or to poorly research things about them before you send a LinkedIn DM. Everybody hates them.
Yes, and don't just send crap to me in my DMs because I'm busy talking to Ken. I can't, I don't have time.
And it's easy to learn about us, by the way. Like, we're normal people. We post about our dogs, right, what we like to do on the weekends. So try harder.
Elijah (03:04.718)
And if I had $10 million, I'd put every penny into this that can something at scale.
Your hair? Your mustache?
I'm gonna grow a more powerful mustache. No, I'd put it into a spectacularly unique opinion and like opinion set and personal brand that dictates everything you say and do publicly. Something that is deep within you that you draw out slowly over time, that's gonna pay dividends for every.
Maybe we talk again, we'll get into the Burt Reynolds mustache experience, but for now, I guess we should continue. And one more, at revenue zen, the line between experiment and engine is what? Designed to something momentum. So at revenue zen, the line between experiment and engine is what? Designed to something momentum.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (04:07.118)
Experiment and engine is mutually inclusive. They are one of the same. And then designed to what? Say it again. Oh, designed to explode momentum. So experimentation needs to be a part of your ongoing system. And that's what the engine is built off of or else it'll get rusty and stop.
A verb, momentum.
Elijah (04:30.05)
beautiful thing about doing things in real time and organically is that it's not perfect, but it's a lot of fun. So next time I'm going to send a PDF and make sure that you have them in front of you so you can just nail these. But you did great off the cuff. So thank you for playing along and kind of getting things rolling. Appreciate it.
Yeah, then horrible recall, but my brain works really well once it knows what it's doing. But yeah, my memory is terrible and, you know, unapologetic about it.
And I'll just be honest for a second because you had a lot of videos before we get going and I had to use a friend of yours tool that whether you like this or not, I'm going to risk it and say it. I scraped the LinkedIn videos from your profile and with the, your friends link to do that in a tool called aware. And you can just pop in the link to the video, download it, and then I'll put it into a transcript tool.
and then I can just kind of help get some research and fodder because sometimes like you, my comprehension isn't always perfect in the moment and that machine will help me kind of figure things out. So I was able to really accelerate some of the research I was doing for the podcast and then was like, I like that, I don't, let's expand on that and go from it. So that was a kind of cool tool. There's some videos, I'm getting to my point, I promise. There's some videos that were really cool.
that talking about like I learned that you're self-professed coffee addict. You have a mini Ozzy shepherd and you proclaim that you're the four-legged dad like heroes of all heroes. And I'm just curious what micro ritual in the morning, whether it's matcha, it's puppy walk, it's journaling, what sharpens your strategic edge Ken? Is there anything or do you just kind of sit and do yoga for 45 minutes and you're lit up?
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (06:02.21)
Yeah.
Elijah (06:24.653)
like a Christmas tree.
I have a lot of natural energy, a lot of enthusiasm for life. And I think temperamentally, yes, those things, I just wake up and I'm pumped in the morning. like every great person that's come before me that I know, I do have a morning routine. It's changed over the years. It's had to, I didn't have a wife and a dog before, but it looks, you know, something like this usually. I make myself an espresso. I have some pistachios and chocolate.
I sit outside on my patio while the sun comes up. Me and my puppy do our thing. I'll usually do tukus time, which is hilarious if you speak Yiddish. But I just sit on my butt and look at the wall for 15 to 20 minutes. Sometimes that's meditation. Sometimes it's journaling. Sometimes it's like reading scripture or praying, but something to get your soul right. Then we go outside, we run, we hike, we walk, me and Simba. And that's really just to get my body moving so that my brain can do what it needs to.
Yeah.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (07:25.47)
and drop the cortisol and all that. So yeah, I tend to do those types of things in the morning. And then when my wife wakes up a little bit later, we have our time and hang out to get me. And that's before I talk to anybody, do any work, open an email. The first two hours of my day, three hours of my day are.
Like you, I have a routine, but it's quite simple. I don't speak Yiddish, so I'm not really there, but I do understand what Tuckas is, so that's fun for me. It's a cup of coffee watching tech YouTubers in the morning. I need 20 minutes to chug some coffee and watch some people that are kind of nerdy and express something before I even talk to people in a real way. Otherwise, I'm cranky as all since, so that's no good either.
You need it, man. I'm not sure how people wake up and just get started with working. I would not be a well-regulated human being.
No, it's not for everybody. This 5 a.m. go to the track or whatever for do 10 miles. No. Some people do it. Good for them. But me, I need like you espresso three shots of coffee. But you weren't always in this mental state, which is kind of interesting. Before the wife and the dog in the early days back in Portland, you had a third date moment. And that was the proof point where your now wife said, I believe in you more than Ken believes in himself.
Ice baths.
Elijah (08:44.418)
How does that lesson echo in your leadership style today?
What a beautiful tier of a question. Wow.
I'll get you thinking, even for a guy who does a tacos in the morning, you know?
I
Those dots I've never connected before, so this is an exclusive, but I would say that the most beautiful thing my wife has taught me related to my management and leadership style is that I used to see vulnerability as a weakness and I used to think that leaderships, the best thing a leader could do was to show invulnerability, to rally the troops. What I've learned since then is that strength,
Elijah (09:01.014)
No.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (09:27.074)
blended together with the ability to be approachable and have empathy for what others, know, what others are experiencing allows them to connect with you. And if they connect with you, they'll be more likely to follow you. And I think Kim is almost solely responsible for helping me see that and learn that lesson.
Is there, was one moment where you said, I'm done with this world, right? You're close to that sort of dark state. Is there a particular moment that you were able to reach deep down and go, no, not today. I got more living to do.
Yeah, I've always had an enthusiasm for my life, but the darkness that you're referring to was, know, I have two clients at the time, I think, maybe three. I did not have enough money to like buy groceries and pay my rent for that week. It was a short period of time, but it was really scary. And living in Portland in my first place by myself. And so the fear there was, the, you know, the thoughts in my mind were...
You should never have done this. You're not good enough. Why are you doing this? And no matter how hard you work, because you've been sacrificing and working so hard, this will never work out. This cannot work out. And the thing I think, the two things I think that brought me back were, one is I have a lot of faith in our creator and not every, everybody has their own spiritual flavor. So I'll leave you to, you know, the universe versus flying spaghetti monster, insert your own here. But faith is important.
like it. Yeah.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (11:01.482)
And then the second thing was slowly but surely getting outside, getting perspective, getting my coffee at my favorite coffee shop running again. so rebuilding in habits that gave me perspective to start to rebuild externally.
How does it feel when somebody comes at you out of nowhere and says I don't care I want to be with you forever doesn't matter unconditional support there in the moment unexpected just yes, man, I got you Does that that obviously gives you the zest of life and says I'm I'm capable of anything But do you do really take that as you know a leader? At revenues end and say hey I'm gonna pay this forward and treat my employees and staff in the same way like I'm gonna champion them lift them up and
and we're just gonna hang and be cool.
I think it's fuel. I think that human beings crave to be seen and heard and understood and like Kim imparting that confidence that I didn't even have in myself really, that is something that I see as my duty as a leader and a manager to impart on others. I I am unrealistically jazzed every time somebody does something like, Mike, our salesperson closed the deal today and it's just Steph Curry memes, shooting to three, high fiving.
Because if it doesn't come from somebody else who you love and respect, you know, it's hard to come from yourself internally.
Elijah (12:27.33)
really cool. think of NBA Jam. He's from downtown, he's on fire or something like that. The cool stuff that you're probably shouting at each other, because you're having a good time. So that was cool. Did that happen? Did you win the business? Did it work? Or do you? Okay. I didn't know if there's a cliffhanger from Ken here, you're going to have to wait to hear the rest on my LinkedIn or something. I don't know.
Yeah, he's quite... No, he's gonna get an upsell soon. That guy, I have a lot of faith in Mike. He's got a good gut and he's a hardworking dude.
That's super cool. So there's GEO that you're big into, the AI spin. You feel that it's maybe data-informed and not data-driven, because that's a different spin from everybody else. Everybody else is looking at KPI's goals and understanding the metrics and the attribution and figuring out, the hell do I do a thing so I can get into the AI summary like yesterday? And you're going, no, you just got to be informed. So is there a first month?
where you can track and plan and kind of help us give it a high level inside the mind of Ken to kind of figure out how you set up for new client to get them closer to that space.
Sure. So shout out to Oz Rashid. I stole the term data informed instead of data driven from him. And that is to say that data, if interpreted incorrectly and analyzed incorrectly, can mislead you. So I like to be informed rather than led. I'm led by my own experience and wisdom. But with that in mind, yeah, generative engine optimization, also known as answer engine optimization, large language model optimization. For everyone out there, it's just...
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (14:00.63)
you being visible inside of generative AI tools like Chat GPT versus Google search, which is completely different in how it indexes, restores, and then retrieves information. The first thing I would do is just go to your Google Analytics for account, go to your referrals and just see, you know, are you getting inbound traffic? Are you getting conversions? Because everyone wants to rush into starting to do all these tactics.
And it might not even be right. You may not even be benefiting from it. And so the first thing is just gain some visibility. An easy way to know this, if you don't have any tracking software, is just to add a form to your site that says, how did you hear about us? And leave it unstructured. It'll surprise you what people say on their journeys. Once you start to understand who's finding you and how they're finding you, a really simple thing to do is, if you don't have content about what you offer, so like,
We have a solutions pages and services pages about how revenues and does what it does. Publishing more stuff about your way of thinking, original research, comparisons of like our site versus our competitor. There's things that are unique to you as a great starting point. The most important thing you can do is inform those models. What's unique about yourself. And I think that's the thing that can't be gamed is brand. So.
Brand mentions across the internet, which are different from backlinks and SEO, are the number one most correlated factor with visibility. And how do you get that? By doing dope stuff and being unique enough to talk about, right? So anyway, that's the first and foremost thing of like start tracking it, talk about yourself in unique and interesting ways about what you do, and then in doing so, you will get mentioned and those mentions end up correlating most highly with visibility.
And there's tons of tactics, that's excellent starting point.
Elijah (15:57.174)
sweet guide thank you. I was wondering if you ever played the reverse Uno card and used AI to be able to set up a process to get this engine running or does it need a human touch?
There's a tremendous amount of automation that can be done to gain insights. So I don't think that you should create a strategy with any sort of tool. I think you as an owner, marketer, a fun person who's just experimenting with this stuff should always set your North Star. You should always have a goal and an overarching strategy, but a really cool way to...
start to do some of this with tools, like an easy thing that people can do is I took all of our CRM data recently from HubSpot, took the form submissions, and I just did a pretty basic like cluster analysis of take every form, put it into categories of what people's needs are. And then we added that information to our site. So when somebody is looking for a solution, here are the pain points that our ICP actually tells us. A lot of people will say chat GPT,
Tell me what my ICP wants. Instead of, let's look at what they've actually told us and then we can relate to them better on the site, which has the benefit of, know, shorter sales cycles, improved conversion rates. So I would say use the technology to accelerate an existing good strategy and a plan versus letting it guide you from the beginning, because it just doesn't know things and there's no way to inform it of where you want to end up in the future, if that makes sense.
Absolutely. So everybody talks about go on Reddit, get your leaders on their CMOs, leaders, CEOs, and say, you should just talk about the thing because it's just a farm for content and have fun. You do a great job on storytelling on LinkedIn, on the videos and mixed content and news, everything you're getting into. It blogs, podcasts exactly like we are today. There's backlinks, there's all the magic.
Elijah (17:57.602)
tools, internal and all that stuff going on. But is there anything particular indirect or direct that's a channel that really surprised you most with inbound leads or do you just collect them everywhere that you go?
We're slowly but surely taking over the internet and trying to be everywhere. But yeah, I
That's right. You got to beat Google because they're taking over the internet. So Revenues End's got to step on and make it happen. Yes.
It's true. And so we'll tie in this to other generative engine optimization tactics. So I think it's somewhat something around 27 % of our source revenues from Alex Boyd, my business partner, is LinkedIn profile or my LinkedIn profile, the combination of those two. And that's not insignificant. So this concept of founder-led sales, founder brand, founder-led content,
It's not just that you're sharing your unique insights and people are, you know, seeing you, liking you, and then associating what your business does with liking you. That in and of itself cannot be understated. If you are an executive or a leader who has the time, you should find a way to get your thoughts onto a platform for your audience hangs out. But secondarily to that,
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (19:16.194)
There are platforms where these large language models pull in information from disproportionate to others. So Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pulse, Quora, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia. It pulls those in to learn about you and show you inside of like chat, GPT, and Gemini. So if not only should you do that from a thought leadership perspective and brand building perspective, but you can talk about yourself in a way that those platforms,
will then feed information to those models so that you can show up when people are searching for your products and services. And so that's just, it's a simple way to not only get more traffic quote unquote, but you can sharpen your message, resonate with your target audience and show up inside of generative AI tools more often. So it's a win, win, win, win, win, win.
It's huge. And nobody talks about getting in the AI summary. So you just dropped all those sites that not a lot of people talk about. So clearly you're doing something and figuring it out. thank you, Ken. That's really cool. Yeah. Is that what you're getting at with human engagement optimization or HEO? I think you kind of calling that engagement metric playing around. that, is that now a Ken trademark or is that something you helped describe how this machine works?
try. Yeah.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (20:32.046)
Yeah, that was what two years ago now. I stole that from a HubSpot executive who said that maybe five or six years ago, but I think they understood where machine learning and AI was headed. so, we're gone are the days where you can put some keywords in a div and get people to show up to your site by tricking them into doing business with you. Gen Z doesn't like F around with that. You know what I mean? And so.
the getting people, the traffic declining. People have a higher bar for trust, less traffic is going to everybody's sites from Google search. But once they get there, even from ChatGPT or Gemini, it is your job to engage, delight, and show them the next step and encourage them to take it. And so I think that's what I was getting at, which is there's a commodity of...
production and distribution now. So the game is not more and more and more traffic, bigger and faster. It's how can we narrow our focus and sharpen to the people who need to hear what we have to say and help them take every step of it, whether it's buying journey or just audience consumption delight journey in our own unique way. And that's the engagement I was talking about. That's the, I think the unlock to how folks can grow these days.
On the other side, people are trying to cheat the system with different H tags, right? The heading two, three, and all that sort of thing, the structure. they're like, the AI crawlers are looking for it. I'm going to put my pillar page up. We're going to do H2, H3. AI is going to love it. We're going to get in the summer. You're going to go, I don't know, we're going to make it rain next quarter. But is there a balance between the structure with this creative brand strategy and the human elements that you're talking about? Or do you just kind of say YOLO and we'll figure it out.
Always. Yeah.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (22:19.756)
I think folks should find the sweet spot between tactics that sometimes feel like gaming the system, right? You need to structure your content and your site in a way where it shows up. You can't just post, you know, a piece of content that doesn't get indexed. It doesn't matter how good it is. If it doesn't get indexed, it's not going to be shown. So a great example of this is you've probably seen sites like G2 and Captera or Clutch where it shows you different vendors who offer services.
Mmm.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (22:49.07)
So a really good tactic is publishing content where you compare yourself to competitors or the best podcasting creative services firms in 2025. But the difference is even if you have the highest ranking piece of content about those podcasts, creative services, once somebody lands, if you're bad mouthing your competitors, you're not being honest about your strengths and weaknesses,
your point of failure is either gonna be losing their trust once they read and they're gonna bounce, or let's say you even convert them, they're gonna notice the difference in your services offered and what you talked about in your promotional materials, and they're not gonna be a long-term client. So the reason why I harp on these fundamentals and why I say, you know, lead with integrity, even if you have to use those same tactics, is because I'd much rather have...
10 people find my piece of content and eight of them convert into a long-term customer, then a thousand visits and none of them convert or they bounce after month one. You tell me what's worth the effort, right?
Yeah, you nobody in B2B, at least that I'm aware of, wants to have a one night stand client. You want the long term, I'm getting married sort of thing, right? The whatever you want to be Polly or Maligand miss. I don't know. But you're working on the B2B structure and that kind of part in the visualization, but you get it. You're laughing because you're like, that's true, man. I don't want to go through the time and effort to rinse and repeat all these clients because I'm trying to get them in the door by snake oil. That's that's not the way to do it.
No.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (24:19.938)
I could just see that as a headline, like the Elijah Pauley content strategy. There's something good there. Yeah.
for the, don't know if it's good, but it's definitely different. That's for sure. I'll take it to the, I'll, I'll maybe I have to consult yourself like, the idea machines like Alex and yourself to say, is this a good idea for podcasting? And you can go off the record. Probably not, but, we'll have to flush that out later. That's fun.
Not the hub and spoke, yeah.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (24:44.59)
Please don't let me forget.
Just amuse you next Friday when you're having a bad week. What was that thing? Ridiculous thing that you talked about and then we get to the giggle town. It'll be good Is there a particular tech stack that you use for AI work or is there even if you don't want to divulge your secret sauce? Maybe there's a couple that folks gets getting into this game can use to kind of get more acquainted with the AMS that's going on
Yes.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (25:13.58)
Yeah, I have no secrets. I love to speak openly about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. So I have the obvious ones. Like I have a custom GPT Kenbot. I talk to him thousands of times per day. And like that's, it's not an exaggeration. Like it's always up for me to, for my thought partnership. And that's just fun because it's like all, you know, all the good training on like my text messages and conversations with my wife and mess like.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (25:41.698)
takeaways from my therapy sessions. So it's pretty on point, but the things that I think are interesting that folks might not have used are one is a tool called cursor or lovable, but basically just like people talk to chat GPT, it's a natural language chat bot that helps you build and ship code. And so for people that, so I have a coding background. I mean, I built applications just like on JavaScript and HTML, CSS and PHP back in
But for people who don't understand code structure, you can just literally fire up your mic and say, I'm thinking about building an ROI calculator for healthcare companies who want to use my podcasting services. What are the inputs that might be useful? And how can I build a forecasting framework to build a tool on my website? And after a you know, a few days of back and forth, it'll tell you step by step on how to ship that. And to me, that is
That is powerful for anybody who may not consider themselves technical, but has really good ideas, is really industrious and knows they can help people if the world had that particular tool. So that is first and foremost, like get very comfortable with that. The next one is N8N. And this is a bit nerdier. It's like if Zapier met Claude or ChatGBT, which it's an automation tool, but it's through AI workflows. So you can do things like.
Cool. Got it.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (27:09.004)
I'm going to give you a sales transcript. want you to go search the internet and see what content has never been spoken about. Insert my transcript as part of the conversation, then go pull 10 of our competitors, build a narrative as far as like what we should talk about, and then write me a piece of content, a YouTube video script and 10 tweet threads, and then go publish them for me. That's something that you can do just through again.
a natural language interface and then it'll go execute those tasks for you. So that's thing number two. And then my third that I would say is more of a GEO focused tool set, which it's called brand AI brand visibility monitoring software. It's a class of tools similar to rank tracking softwares. They basically just deploy a bunch of prompts across time, across IP addresses. And they start to give you a picture of how your brand shows up inside of generative AI environments like a chat, GPT perplexity and that
That's the beginning of a well-executed plan is those data points of how you're showing.
That's super cool. So brand visibility monitoring that you're talking about with those, that suite of tools, it gives you a lot of noise sometimes if you're not quite at Ken level, if you're not the Ken bot and you don't have a Barbie or whatever the analogy is to help you with the other tools. Of course I had to, I had to. How do you mix the operation?
Yeah.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (28:36.366)
That's great.
Elijah (28:42.19)
side of things into content priorities. You take the content, you have the insights, and then is it just experience that helps you unleash those priorities or is there a secret sauce behind the scenes?
Yeah, I'll answer this, guess, in two ways. If you're starting out and that's overwhelming to you of like, need to track my brand's visibility, reverse engineer the factors that led the people ahead of me to winning and then deploy that as my own set of tactics. I would actually tell that person just to stop and take a step back and do what I call startup content strategy in a box. So before you can...
reverse engineer a contest strategy to show up in like AI, you know, environments. Do you have the following? This is the type of person I want to help. You know, your ICP ideal customer profile. Here's what I uniquely do to help them. Here are the pain points that that solves. And then this is the benefit to them. Great. You have that. Now at every stage of their decision-making, you can use top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, problem aware solution, where it doesn't matter. Let's just call it three steps.
not ready to buy learning, understanding their solution, and then you are the solution. Do I have a piece of content on my site, or at least one representative of all those solutions, on my site or on LinkedIn or another platform? And if you don't have a piece of content that describes the problem, describes the solution, and describes how you solve it, go create those assets first. That is so much more beneficial to your success.
than trying to create the next best piece of content that's gonna land you in chat GPT. Because if you don't have that stuff, again, brand mentions are the number one factor, you're not gonna show up anyway, even if you did make those changes. And so I would offer that to that person. The second thing is, I think that there is a pressure, usually from CEOs who just got back from a conference who wanna eliminate their workforce magically with AI.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (30:45.248)
And incorrectly, by the way, that's a logical fallacy. Go look it up on the revenues and website of why that's a silly thing. but
I'll get the link and we'll drop in the description so people can check it out.
Yeah, I really, it's on our YouTube channel too of just the common four misconceptions and logical fallacies that executives make about this stuff. But anyway,
The iPlay drives me nuts, so thank you for calling that out. Appreciate it.
Yeah, you got it. So this person really just needs to, instead of a fear-based and maybe reactive approach to using tools out of fear of missing out, I would instead offer pick one use case that is really painful to you. So for us, for the GEO stuff, might be, my boss says that I need to know how our brand is showing up. So.
Elijah (31:19.406)
Hmm.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (31:36.184)
Go pick a tool and learn one thing about it each month. So I offer to people that feel overwhelmed or don't know how to use something, just pick one use case, one tool per month and get good at it and solve a real problem that you're actually having versus playing with a tool, trying to go deep for no reason because your motivation will fizzle out and you're gonna move on to the next thing. So, but solving tangible problems one baby one at a time, even with this,
Visibility monitoring software, that's the way to go. Master one feature that solves a real problem that you have today, spend a month on it. That's my advice to that person.
Hmm. You talk about FOMO, so I can't help but ask about panic branding. You get into conferences, you're in RSA for cybersecurity, there's Black Hat coming up. People are probably going to do two week plan. Be like, it's a conference. I need to do something. But for, I guess, identifying what matters. Is there a single goal, a KPI, a stat, something that should be really
the biggest heavy hitter, because we're talking about one thing at one time. To take that focus into the event, is there something that the B2B company needs to look at before even booking the booth at the event that you can think of?
Yeah, I mean, all goals are context dependent, but I do think the answer is somewhere of like, it has to be what we consider business metrics. And so if I had a booth, I think I would ask our salesperson or whoever was leading the event team, how many handraisers did we have? How many, well, we call them qualified opportunities in our CRM, but it wouldn't be.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (33:21.24)
how many business cards I got. It wouldn't be how many conferences we attended. It wouldn't be things that are activity related. It would be something that maps to this X, Y, and Z business outcome. And usually that's hand raisers like we call it again, qualified opportunities, but it could be somebody who booked a meeting after the conference to learn more. So I think folks get caught up in...
KPIs far too often. They're useful. But again, we're not data-driven. We're data-informed. And so there's this funny concept called the crocodile right now with Google search clicks. Clicks are going down while impressions are going up. So it forms like a little crocodile mouth. But if your clicks are going down, but you look at your organic search sales or your ARR for the year and it's going up, what's the problem? There is none because you looked at the business metrics. So that's why I say anchor yourself with business outcome metrics.
but KPIs are still useful as lead indicators.
Focus on something else, but use the data to tell the story. Don't focus on that thing as the thing. And then you'll be winning like Ken. Easy. Yeah, I can win too. No problem. Especially if we get into weird things like that, that one night stand analogy. I'm going for the podcast. One night stand analogy, all in. That'll be fun marketing play. We'll see how goes.
Yeah, the data isn't the story. It tells the story. Exactly.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (34:32.554)
And Elijah.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (34:44.728)
I dig that. I think people would be into like the Polly podcast, but it's actually about marketing tactics.
Yes, they have no idea. I'm just fooling everybody. It's magic. I'll need a gold chain too. That'll be good. That'd be fine. You built, sold and rebuilt, weathered COVID and downturns. So you've been through all that fun time. What's the one belief from those personal peaks and valleys that every growth seeker should adapt? So your pain, somebody else's gain, you know?
Okay, I'll send you to where I got this one.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (35:18.028)
I do. Yeah. Wow. Like I'm remembering sitting in my chair in Portland with my books because I didn't have a standup desk yet or a proper desk setup. So books, my laptop on books. And I remember thinking after I lost one of my clients, I kept doing the services for them for two months. And so I think if anything stands out to me, it's that you can't
You have to think about your wellbeing like Maslow's hierarchy before you can serve others. But the thing that stands out to me is that a focus on helping folks achieve disproportionate outcomes to how much they were paying me through the hardest time of their lives and mine, allow me to weather that storm and come out even, you know, even better, even more fortified. There was a temporary dip in revenue, but because I kept those relationships alive and actually formed new ones.
because of how I showed up in that hard environment. I was able, I think, to come out of it even more fortified and resilient than before. give more than you think is needed and do it with an excellent attitude whenever possible. And that seems a little squishy, but that's a value system that I have and I think it served me the most during those times.
I mean, you went from one place in your life to smiling, being relaxed, having a ukulele in your room with a bunch of books. mean, it's, it's seriousness. It's a long way and a lot of hard work to put in there. So I'm curious then now that you're in an excellent head space, you're super confident and you're succeeding beyond marketing. What gives you joy in your life?
Yeah.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (36:49.25)
Yeah.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (37:01.646)
Oh, wow. Being. Yeah, I was going to for if we're not talking about being on podcasts with Elijah and chopping it up, man, I I love being near. I love being in water at the beach. That's why we moved to San Luis Obispo. The first thing I thought of was just sitting on the beach. My legs kicked up. I got a beer. My dog's running around. I got a book. I'm taking a nap. I'm in and out of just enjoying things. So the beach is definitely my happy place. I love camping and hiking.
Like just besides talking to me, I know, I know that's enough joy.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (37:32.27)
Doing jujitsu, I haven't done that in a few months, but I'm a pretty rowdy dude, so. Yeah.
Do ever try to get the subboard with your Aussie or is that too dangerous of a play?
No, we have standup paddleboards and mine is actually like a daddy one. It's carbon fiber, which I know is kind of bougie, but like it can hold me, my wife and my dog without a problem. I mean, it's it's solid. So yeah.
That's like the modern version of those 70s station wagons where you sit in the back, the trunk. That's what it feels like. Everybody's along for the ride, having fun, crank the tunes, Bluetooth headsets or whatever they are. And you have a great time.
Yeah, that's the vibe. That's exactly right. We have our speaker in the back as we're riding out on the, there's a few different, like there's a lake and we can do it in the ocean. But yeah, man, just being with people that I love having a good drink and being outside, you know, I don't need anything else.
Elijah (38:14.744)
That's sweet.
Elijah (38:22.37)
We tease the heck out of what you do, Ken, but if you could look into this camera, please and thank you and tell our listeners where they can follow your GEO wizardry and everything you're building at Revenues End so we can help share, spread the word about your magic.
Heck yeah, so Ken Magna Marshall, you can type that into your browser on LinkedIn. I'm always posting stuff, thoughts, and big brain insights. And then get in touch with me. I'm a normal human being, super simple. I love to workshop and solve problems in real time, and I'm always available.
tweet. You always make time for me and I appreciate it, including this conversation, which is super dope and all the unleashing that you did today because there's a lot of secrets here that you don't have, but you shared, which is even better. So from that secrets, I'd like to add a few more conversations to queue up. If you're wanting to binge the tea time episodes, feel free. There's a sophisticated yet scrappy marketing that actually drives growth.
There's a lady, Christy, Christy Camacho. She shows startups how to pair enterprise level strategy with some go-kart strappiness and get into like her formula one habits, have some fun and do a spin leaning into budgets and real pipeline. And then there's our Pien Babloyan. She's in a threat connect and she walks people through reverse waterfall tracking and sales alignment tactics to make every marketing dollar count. Kind of cool. Especially as a global demand, global demand gen leader.
It's pretty neat, but I wanted to let you know Ken, that Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders is powered by MKG Marketing. The slogan, we manage the details, you capture the market. Hopefully that resonates with you as a marketer. It doesn't sound like spin. And I'm Elijah. I'm way too sexy for this microphone and I'll talk to you soon.
Ken Marshall Ken webcam 00h 00m 00s 394ms StreamYard (40:03.374)
Cheers, bye.
I'll miss you. There we go.