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Interviews with top marketers sharing tactical tips, strategies, and lessons learned to help you grow your business. Hosted by Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit Five, former CMO, and author of Founder Brand. Learn more at exitfive.com
E5_Alex Howe - Audio Episode
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[00:00:00] You're listening to The Dave Gerard Show Action
[00:00:17] All right, this company grew from 3 million to 50 million in ARR without doing any paid ads. That's what my guest pulled off at Funnel Leasing. His name is Alex Howe, and he's the SVP of marketing and growth at Funnel Leasing, a company north of 50 million that builds renter-focused leasing and communication tools for property management companies.
[00:00:36] A great example of a B2B business that's really interesting to you if you work in marketing. And here's what I love about Alex's story. He started off in PR and comms, then jumped into sales and found it brutal, and he actually inherited a marketing team of one and built the whole thing from scratch with no traditional marketing background.
[00:00:53] We got into how that path shaped the way he runs marketing today, and the lessons in this one are really good, and it's all about the timeless [00:01:00] stuff. If you're a little bit burnt out on all AI this and AI that, I think you're gonna really enjoy this episode. It's all about being different instead of just being better, how they grew to 50 million without spending money on ads, using events to stand out, building their own user conference.
[00:01:13] Heck, even making the brand be pink to stand out. I really enjoyed this episode with Alex, a nice little refreshing, grounding episode about the life of a B2B marketing leader. Here's my conversation with Alex Howe. All right, so you're Alex Howe. What do you do for work, sir? My title is the SVP of marketing and growth at a company called Funnel Leasing.
[00:01:34] So we are... Think of the entire resident renter life cycle from initial inquiry when you're looking at an apartment online through getting screened, and you apply, and your tour gets scheduled and rescheduled. You ultimately move in, you pay your rent, you submit a maintenance request when the toilet breaks.
[00:01:54] All of that is handled within our platform. So we basically sell to super [00:02:00] large apartment owners and managers. It's a true B2B2C, right? Like, we don't have millions of customers. We have a set number of- Yeah ... concentrated big guys, but they have billions of customers. Yeah. That's a perfect example of, like, I was just-- My folks were up this weekend.
[00:02:16] We're having a little cookout here and, you know, for, for 15 years, I've been trying to explain to them what B2B marketing is. And like your company's a perfect exam- what you do is a perfect example of that, 'cause I think if you're in marketing, everyone kinda defaults to like, you know, Salesforce and HubSpot and MarTech, and it's like, oh no, there's all these services from all different parts of life.
[00:02:37] And this is my whole point where I make this argument. I try to be an advocate for people who are like, "Oh, B2B marketing, that's so lame." And like, it's actually more interesting businesses, more complex businesses, more often meaningful businesses than a lot of the consumer stuff. We just, for whatever reason, we think it's cooler to be like the VP of marketing at like Liquid Death, where I'm like, dude, that's just water in a can.
[00:02:57] Where like what you do is like, oh, I have to actually really [00:03:00] understand that. I hadn't even heard the term multifamily when I joined, and then all of a sudden I recognize a third of Americans rent. This is like the single most expensive thing they buy every month for most of their adult lives, and where you live, what could matter more than where you live, right?
[00:03:15] It's like access to schools and healthy food and friends and network and jobs. It's like this massive industry that I didn't consider but is so important in people's lives. Okay, so what's interesting about the marketing playbook here, right? Who is your ICP? In particular, it's operators and marketers at these very large either ownership groups that physically own the buildings, or in many cases, they will actually farm out the management of it to a third-party service.
[00:03:47] So they basically ensure that the apartment stays rented, maintenance gets covered, people renew, things like that. Bills get paid. Okay, so you kinda have a, there's like a split. You don't always know. There's a lot of nuance into, [00:04:00] like, who owns the building and how it works. There's a lot of nuance just because our technology is so foundational that it touches lots of departments: training, marketing, ops, C-suite, financial.
[00:04:13] And so we're often herding lots of cats with very separate personas and pain points together and trying to get them over the finish line at the same time. Okay, so you, you've been there for over five years. When you joined, the company was around 3 million in revenue. Now it's over 50. I hate... One of my biggest, uh, complaints about podcasts and content is it's just almost impossible to always explain these stories.
[00:04:38] But I wanna, like, unpack this because you're similar to my backstory. You came up, you had fama, PR, you know, you were P- you started your career in, like, PR and comms, and now you're SVP of marketing at a $50 million revenue company. I'd love to try to just, like, unpack some of the things in the last five years that you think have had a big impact on the marketing success here with the lens of, like, I [00:05:00] think it's, uh, easy to have, like, a, a flash period of growth, but I think one of the hardest things to do is to build a predictable, repeatable growth machine, which once you get to the stage of revenue that you're at, that's what the CEO wants, that's what investors want, whoever's guiding the strategy of the company.
[00:05:13] And then also just maybe later we can talk about how you got to pivot from a PR guy to SVP of marketing. Yeah, I mean, it started with having zero idea what I was doing. Much like you, I came from the comms background, but I just approached all of our campaigns and what we focused on with what I would want as a buyer myself.
[00:05:32] I mean, we're all selling to other people. They are still people at the end of the day. You should approach them in the same way, like, with psychological tricks, with... Not even tricks, but things that would actually make them wanna buy. And my mantra's always been focused around being different rather than being better.
[00:05:49] I mean, great to be better too if you've got a great product, but that's not memorable. Where did you pick that up from along the way? Dating. I mean, I think you're out there competing with a bunch of other people all the [00:06:00] time. Did you show them your hummingbird tattoo and it was over? That helped in some cases, but- Right?
[00:06:05] I mean, you're always up against other people with something similar to offer, and the people that folks remember are the ones who are a little different. They're the ones that make you feel a certain way. They have some kind of a taste that you're not used to, right? I mean, particularly when people are going through software, they are looking at, I imagine, dozens of vendors or at least screening a few of them a day.
[00:06:28] You're one of many. If you don't stand out to them, if you don't stand out at a booth, at an event, on your podcast, we're inundated with too much stuff. It's better to be different and at least be memorable and then wanna know more. I mean, this is the stuff that I love. There's so much we could, you know, you can talk about.
[00:06:45] I, I wrote this post the other day about, like, TikTok works, LinkedIn works, direct mail work, everything works, but it's like having this usually... You know, it's fun. My job now is to basically interview, like, top performers in, in marketing, and so I get to see, you know, what people have done. And everybody always has this type of view [00:07:00] where it's not necessarily one particular tactic.
[00:07:02] It's this-- It's-- There's usually a overarching philosophy that leads to this, and I think what you said in there is really important, and I just wanna reiterate that for folks. It's this idea, like, you have to be in the consumer's mind, and I think a lot of people are afraid of mentioning competitors, talking about competitors.
[00:07:17] And exactly what you just said, it's like, dude, you know, someone's not just gonna shop, even if the price is right. Like, it's like anything. "Okay, I, I think I wanna go with Funnel Leasing, but I should at least do some diligence and check out two or the th- two or three other companies in the space." And so it's like, how are you gonna do marketing with that context in mind that people are, are shopping?
[00:07:34] They're not necessarily ready to buy. They're gonna look at two or three other solutions. And your whole point to me is, like, empathy, right? Why would I... We were just having a conversation with our team on Friday. We wanna do this big webinar next week 'cause we wanna promote our, our event drive, and we're thinking, and I'm just like, in the middle of the meeting I'm like, "Okay, this is a cool idea, but, like, would you go to this?"
[00:07:51] And everyone's like, "No, not really. I, I wouldn't." Well, so okay. So then let's scrap it. What would make you take an hour out of your day to actually show up on this thing? And then let's go build that. [00:08:00] I think the other thing you mentioned that I hadn't said yet is the comparison part. Everything we do, we compare to something similar.
[00:08:07] You are right now comparing me to the last guest you had on here, right? I walk into a hotel, I think about the last hotel I stayed at. And if you're not willing to very directly speak to that, you're gonna lose them because their context is what they know, right? So knowing your competitors, knowing where you differentiate, and again, the differentiation part, that's the part that people remember.
[00:08:29] How are you different than what I know is crucial, and that's something that I've definitely tried to push into the sales side. I don't manage the sales team. I did manage at a certain point the sales engineers on our team, and everything I tried to teach was around know the three competitors that come up the most, know how we're different, be able to speak to that pretty specifically.
[00:08:50] If you're familiar, there's a April Dunford, Dunford who wrote Obviously Awesome and then a sales pitch. Her whole point, right, is like- Teach people how to buy [00:09:00] because all they know is what they know. They're not in the weeds like you are. You need to come in and speak to context, comparisons, and then say, "Got it, so if you think those are important, these are the check marks you have to hit for whatever you buy.
[00:09:13] It might not be us, but make sure you cover those things. And now let's talk about where we come in with that." At the end, I mean, your, your portion is at the end, which is, you know, you asked what, what I focused on, and it's we ungated everything. Gating is the most annoying thing in the world. We put our prices on the website.
[00:09:31] Nobody does that in our world. We made our LinkedIn interesting. Let's take a beat on each of these. So why do you think nobody puts pricing on the website? Not just in your industry, but maybe, you know, you're obviously, you have a bunch of peers in, in marketing. Why do you think that is? I mean, it's desperation, right?
[00:09:47] You're clinging onto this hope that if they reach out to then talk to you, you'll get a chance to prove that your company is worth whatever you wanna charge. Yeah, I, I was always told it's so sales can, like, control, the company can [00:10:00] control the conversation a little bit more. It's control. It's, it's a need for control, in my opinion.
[00:10:04] And I'm of the build it and they will come. I've been fortunate, I have a CEO who gets marketing, gets the long game, never pressured too much just to have, like, immediate leads that may not be great fits right away. And instead, focus on thought leadership, focus on podcasting and events that are a slow burn, but those folks self-select, right?
[00:10:29] You will know damn well they are qualified, and they will know they're qualified for you by the time they actually do reach out if you give them everything, right? You show it to them, you treat them like adults. Yeah, my friend Pranav, he runs a company called Paramark, and we did a webinar a year or two ago, and his whole thing is like, "Don't treat people like they're morons."
[00:10:46] So an example was, like, if I have Alex on my podcast and Alex could sell something to this audience, the actual best thing is for Alex not to sell at all, but to come on the podcast and just be fucking awesome. And [00:11:00] at the end of the podcast, people are gonna, "Dude, that guy was really good. He was really impressive.
[00:11:03] What was the company?" And guess what they're gonna do? They're gonna reach out. The issue, though, is, like, as marketers, we often have a specific goal, and we have a specific campaign, and, "Okay, I'm gonna go on Dave's pod, but I wanna give him this, you know, short URL so we can track the, like, seven people who go from, you know, the podcast to our funnel."
[00:11:23] But to your point, Alex, before, when was the last time you've been listening to a podcast and there's a CTA in the podcast that immediately you're gonna pull over and, like, type it in? No, you're gonna do it later. 100%. All right. So you mentioned, I made some notes here, like the CEO gets marketing, thought leadership.
[00:11:37] I wanna come back to that. But, uh, just on this point about pricing, I think there's long been, uh, you know, VPs of sales and CROs who say like, "Well, we, we wanna be able to control the thing." But this goes back to your point about being the buyer. I don't know, dude, everything I've bought, oftentimes it's like, how much does it cost?
[00:11:52] And like, then let's have a conversation about it. That is a huge factor in it, and I'm absolutely not gonna get on a call with you [00:12:00] only for you to then tell me the price, and then I'm like, "I just wasted 30 minutes 'cause I, I wish I had known this." And then also, as someone who manages the budget in my roles, and I'm sure you're the same way- If it's like, I hate when a PR agency or someone else is like, "Well, what's your budget?"
[00:12:14] And I'm like, it's not like I ha- 'cause if I say my budget is 20 grand, and you were gonna charge me 15, guess what you're gonna charge me now? You're gonna charge 20. Let's talk through the problem, let's talk through the solution, let's talk through the price, and then I can make a decision. You you know what I mean?
[00:12:28] I cannot stand that budget question either. If I get on with a vendor and they have not made it clear what the pricing is, I will ask almost at the beginning. I jump in all the time. I think I'm a B2B SaaS worst nightmare. I just ask the tough questions right away. But 100% agree with you, give the people things up front.
[00:12:45] They will reach out if they're interested. To your point about pricing, you gotta know the price up front. Even though we are buying software with, like, the company credit card, we still think of it like our own, right? You are buying something with someone else's [00:13:00] credit card. You still need to know this isn't a rip-off.
[00:13:03] I'm not getting hosed here, so I need to just set context of things like price. Does it integrate with the tools that I use every day? Do you have referenceable customers? Do you sell to people like me? That stuff matters early. Can you talk about the gated content thing, because this comes up a lot. I think everybody philosophically agrees with you, but then to your same point about having empathy for the customer, I also have empathy for the marketer who has a number on their head and has to prove that the things they're doing are driving revenue.
[00:13:34] And so if you un-gate everything, how do you, you know, what have you done over these five years to prove that those things are driving revenue? You know, the question that I'm trying to ask there. I get it. My heart goes out to marketers who do have the number on their head. I am fortunate enough in this in-house role, the first one I had, to not have ever had that pressure.
[00:13:56] That being said, there are ways that you can actually [00:14:00] demonstrate what you're doing is working, right? In my case, we do almost no outbound, so everything is inbound, which came from somewhere. I didn't create those leads, right? They came from all of our concerted efforts. And also anecdotes, I'm in a small enough TAM, I bet whenever we crunch the numbers, there's something like 2,000 accounts we would ever sell to.
[00:14:23] That's pretty small. Wait, you have a small TAM, but you don't do outbound? Correct. We're... It comes from consistency, putting things out people want, not gating stuff, good reputation. You haven't needed to do outbound. We have not. You know, around events and things, of course, we're gonna reach out to schedule meetings and things, but something like half of our TAM has come through our doors, whether showed up at our booth for a meeting, come to our event, asked for a demo request.
[00:14:50] You know, I invested a lot in self-service product tours on the website. We use a company called Storylane, makes it super easy. They're all persona [00:15:00] specific, they're product specific, they're pain specific. However you're thinking about the problem you wanna solve or the solution you're shopping for, we try to build a tour around that where you don't have to pick up the phone and talk to someone like me or some other salesperson you don't wanna talk to.
[00:15:16] I get that. So back to your initial question, in my small TAM, anecdotes matter. The person who sends your CEO a LinkedIn note that says, "Heard you guys on the podcast, I'd love to talk Person who comes up to us at a booth and yells, "I love your playbook you design," right? Or people on a Gong call, sales team tags me in in Slack and says, "Hey, you gotta check out this clip."
[00:15:42] Somebody held up, you know, the job descriptions that we put together and put out as templates for free, and showed me their notes on it. Those are the kinds of things that clearly if those folks are showing you, it's happening much more often than we're seeing, right? Obviously, I can't track [00:16:00] and metric all the dark social stuff that's happening outside of my world, but- But it must be something inside of the company, 'cause, like, logically it all makes sense.
[00:16:08] You do a bunch of good stuff. You put it all out in the world. It all comes inbound. But why do you think so many people that listen to this podcast or in our community, why do they need to measure the value of this, doing a podcast? Or how do you measure the ROI of, you know, this article that we wrote?
[00:16:27] How come you haven't had to answer those questions? And I, I agree with you, by the way. It's like, how do you know? You just know. When I worked at this company, Drift, we had a podcast, and everyone was like, "How are you gonna know if it works?" And, like, literally everyone that came inbound for the first five million-ish in revenue would say, "Oh, I listened to the pod.
[00:16:45] I listened to the pod." There, there wasn't a metric there, it just was a feeling. But why do you think so many people get stuck on that inside of their companies? Is it 'cause they don't work for a CEO who gets marketing, and that's a secret ingredient here? Like ... I, I think that could be one of the reasons.
[00:16:58] I think it could be from [00:17:00] just more, much more of a transactional business than mine, right? If you are, if your sales cycle is two weeks, I can understand how you'd wanna see a pop after very specific campaigns and wanna measure against that. Yeah. What's your sales cycle? Six months, a year sometimes, depending on these massive enterprise customer.
[00:17:18] I mean, it could, it could go faster, certainly. We've had two or three months. So you're forced into, you have to just, like, do good stuff that compounds over time because it's not a transactional sale. Not even close. So you have to keep putting drops in the bucket, drops in the bucket, drops in the bucket, and then when this person is ready, they're gonna come to us, and we have the brand that they know, like, and trust.
[00:17:37] Yeah. Exactly. And, you know, I think we have a good reputation in the space. Part of it is the brand awareness stuff. I inherited, you know, a pretty new ... We had just changed the name of the company. We had pivoted from a completely different product that we were selling. Initially we were just in the New York Metro area, focused on brokers.
[00:17:57] We outgrew that, pivoted to a CRM [00:18:00] AI platform, anywhere but New York, in effect. And our CEO was wise enough to evaluate all the colors of other companies in our world and just said, "Nobody's got pink," right? Like, pink, bright neon pink, that's our color. We are super well-known for it. And things like that, again, be different, be memorable.
[00:18:21] Stand out, and people, especially in a longer sales cycle, like they'll show you whether it's working or not. You know, part of it may al- may also be those are folk- the folks that have this pressure, maybe they don't have a great product. I can't speak to every one of the examples. In our case- Do you have a great product?
[00:18:38] We have a really great product, right? We have... Our net revenue retention is close to 130%. I mean, we are off of the charts in terms of- I mean, this is like the most underrated. This is why... Look, and I write a lot of this stuff, so the, people can roll their eyes all they want. But when we actually sit down and talk to someone, it's like that's a huge part of the nuance of like what, of the marketing advice.[00:19:00]
[00:19:00] It's like if the product is great, okay, then the strategy, you know, I think a lot of folks are stuck at companies doing marketing jobs where the product really, they might not even have product market fit. It might be an irrational, you know, idea from the CEO. If you have the data that says, "Man, people really love our product," gosh, that's a great position to play from from a marketing standpoint versus at other companies, the marketing team often has to be so involved in pricing and packaging and competitive and all this stuff when it's like, dude, if we have the, if we have the right product here, like let's, now we can go do these things.
[00:19:33] Oh, we have the right product, but let's have it be in pink, and let's go to these events and stand out. Like did you know that as five years ago when you were, when you were interviewing and, and the company had a couple million in revenue, and you believe that, or has it been an evolution? I couldn't have known that entirely, right?
[00:19:49] Like when I was interviewing and the things I was being told, I, I didn't know what the term multifamily meant when I joined. I actually joined as a salesperson, just to switch it up a little bit. Oh. But- Wait, that's the [00:20:00] headline here. Who did my prep notes? The headline is "Sales Guy Turns SVP of Marketing and Grows the Company to $50 Million in Revenue."
[00:20:06] That's pretty good. I like that. With no paid, with no paid ads. That's in my come back to later bucket. Okay. Sales guy who found it way too hard and then went to marketing 'cause he was better at that, basically. Yeah Yeah. 'Cause everyone's like, "Oh, you should be inter- you need to interview the company as much as they're interviewing you."
[00:20:24] And I'm like, well, I guess it depends on the circumstances of the market, you know. Everybody's always like, "Oh, it's easy for you to say, Dave. You work for a CEO who gets marketing." But, like, yeah, it i- it's hard, it's hard to diagnose that and, you know, you get maybe two hours total of, like, interview time, a lot of times over Zoom, then you're hanging out in person and you're supposed to, like, be a judge of whether this is the right product, and you're, you're not a...
[00:20:44] It's not like you're a building owner and you know what products work in this space. So I think it's, it's nice to say that, but it's harder to actually, like, know that. And of course, would we all pick jobs where the product was, you know, flying off the shelves? Would that make life easier? Heck yeah. I think it's also a matter of your evolution as [00:21:00] a professional, right?
[00:21:01] You are probably in a fairly desperate place when you first come out of school or are looking for your initial marketing job. You probably have to take a job. It doesn't-- You are not given the luxury of fully researching and vetting and having a competitive bidding process on your head. You gotta learn the basics, figure out where your strengths are, and I think after a year or two, if you're, turns out you're pretty good at that thing, you are gonna have a lot more hand to be able to start looking out there and seeing like, "Oh, my company's not great.
[00:21:31] Here are some better ones. I'm gonna make a very concerted effort and make that point in why I'm asking to join them. Like, I have done my research. I know this is great." Yeah, we've got a number of REIT customers, right? So these are publicly held real estate trusts, R-E-I-T, REIT, and they have to do earnings calls.
[00:21:49] So they actually go on the record in front of shareholders and say, "We switched to this company Funnel, and it's, in one case, saved us $4 to $5 million annually. [00:22:00] It's made our people 30% more efficient," things like that. And who's gonna believe a vendor, right, at the end of the day? They, you, you kinda go, "Oh, there may be some truth there, but I can't fully believe it."
[00:22:09] These are earnings calls on the public record to shareholders who are gonna be all over them if anything's wrong. Those things we hold up all day. And then in particular, we let our customers talk. We haven't spent too much time talking about events, but we started our own user conference three years ago, which had long been on my bucket list, and we really let our customers speak.
[00:22:32] We positioned it initially as, this is not gonna be like other industry conferences. There's not gonna be other vendors there. We are not gonna sell you on Funnel. We are gonna let your peers, your competitors, share what's working and what's not. We're gonna let you guys network. We're gonna do it at a really nice bucket list hotel.
[00:22:51] We're gonna give you cool swag. We're gonna think through every detail. We're gonna make sure that the flow and the agenda is amazing. I spend way too much time thinking about this thing, [00:23:00] but it has paid off, right? Like, that is our best source of ROI They're not hearing it from us. We are, in some cases, we allow customers to be the only people on stage.
[00:23:10] We're not even moderating, and so they really have free reign to take the conversation the way they wanna go. Yeah, and is the event strictly customer? You have to be a customer to be there. No, and that's, that was another very intentional thing. We wanted to make it about this new operating model in our space, which is called centralization, which is another thing that we very early on saw a trend happening.
[00:23:35] Centralization really just means you're taking these traditional on-site jobs. You walk into a big apartment complex, and there's a leasing office. Those folks do everything. They deal with the person whose toilet broke. They deal with the guy who said a dog just bit him in the front yard. They handle evictions.
[00:23:52] The rest of the world has moved to a very specialized role for these people. We saw that happening, and early on we said, "That's the [00:24:00] future. People should be reorg-ing Putting people in different positions, and that was super controversial at the time, by the way. Three years ago, four years ago, a lot of on-site teams, which is the bulk of your workforce, thought it meant they're all getting fired.
[00:24:16] It didn't. It's a very seasonal hiring job where peak season you hire a bunch of people, the folks who aren't there for the long run, don't care, aren't great, they leave. And instead, we basically said, "Keep your best people all year. Use AI and technology to help with the dips." And for a long time, we talked about centralization when, again, other vendors were saying like, "That's bad.
[00:24:38] Let's not talk about it." And so just staking your claim on something that is controversial, is different, is also memorable, right? Oh, that's the company that always talks about centralization, in our case. Where did that narrative come from inside of the company? Like, how does that strong point of view come out?
[00:24:54] I think a lot of people struggle with like, "Yeah, I wanna do thought leadership, but like my CEO doesn't have any [00:25:00] thoughts." I schedule a regular meeting with my CEO 'cause he is talking to customers more than anybody. He's still super involved in most of our bigger sales cycles. And so he and a couple other key people really get close to top operators who are often a couple of years ahead of the rest of the industry.
[00:25:20] And so I'll regularly pick his brain and just say, "What are they talking about?" We'll spitball it, flesh it out a little bit more, and then say, "There's something here," right? And then we will be talking about that thing more, we'll be referencing it. We may invite that person onto our podcast, which has been another...
[00:25:37] I would say kind of all the things that we've done, our own user conference, our podcast, the way we stand out at industry conferences, our thought leadership. Gotta do a lot of stuff. There's no silver bullet here. I wish there was. But you do it all pretty well, and you're known as being partners, helpful, wanting to work with your vendors, really understanding them, [00:26:00] building for this super niche vertical, they come around.
[00:26:02] Yeah, this part is not sexy, but like I think what you're describing is how to do good marketing, which is have a deep understanding of your customer Ideally, be at a company where the company was founded out of a deep need. I'm sure your CEO didn't just start this company to make money in the real estate technology industry.
[00:26:21] There's usually some DNA there that leads to them starting the company, which is also why they have thought leadership. Understand where your customers hang out, and so you mentioned, you know, thought leadership, events, your user conference, podcasts. Build a memorable brand, LinkedIn, have a strong point of view.
[00:26:36] Tie all those things together. But also choose when you're gonna go to an event, don't just go to the event and have a regular booth. Like, let's take this like, okay, let's go back to the thing you said in the first five minutes of this podcast, which is, okay, if I'm going to an event and there's 50 other vendors there, what can we do to actually get the right people to come to our booth?
[00:26:54] And what would I... If I was going to that event, what would I do? Package all that up, and that is how you do good [00:27:00] marketing, but that, that's not, like, a sexy, like, doesn't play as, like, a headline on, on LinkedIn. You know, people wanna know, like, how they grew to 50 million in revenue and I see this stuff all the time, drives me nuts.
[00:27:10] Here's how this company grew to 50 million in revenue, you know, by making videos on TikTok, and it's like, well, that's not actually what happened. It's actually more about this, like, strong product marketing and thought leadership and strategic alignment and, you know. The events, I wanna tell you a couple of my favorite ones.
[00:27:25] We a few years ago did... And this conference took place on October 30th. So we did a apartment of horrors haunted house maze, where we actually had people getting lost in parts of our booth and screams and lights and animated videos of zombies with dead leases coming out of the ground. People, they loved it.
[00:27:47] It was so fun. What was the event? 'Cause I w- I wanna write about this in our newsletter later, so I just wanna- It's called Apartmentalize. It actually just wrapped. We were in New Orleans last week for it. It's the largest event in our industry. This past year, it's [00:28:00] World Cup, so we're leaning into that. We had a soccer simulator and an AI goalie, and people were taking shots in our booth, not alcohol, taking foot shots- Got you
[00:28:09] of the ball. Both would be fun. But people love that, right? And it's- Yeah, so you're hijacking, like, how can you hijack a trend that's relevant right now to get people to do... I mean, we've even seen silly things like at our... Not, it's not silly, but, like, o- the one of the best sponsor activations at our event was, uh, a headshot booth because they're marketers.
[00:28:27] Everyone has a LinkedIn profile. Usually it's some, you know, you kinda look kinda handsome in someone's, like, wedding photo, and so you crop your head out, and that becomes your profile How do you turn those... So the World Cup thing gets a bunch of attention, gets people to your booth. How do you f- are you scanning a badge to, like, you have to scan a badge to participate in that?
[00:28:46] How do you turn that into demand? I probably lose a few opportunities because I'm not militant about having us scan every badge, 'cause I know a good number of people coming into that booth just wanna kick the hell out of the ball. They just wanna have fun with [00:29:00] it. They've felt like it's been a while since I've kicked a soccer ball.
[00:29:03] But we will attempt to talk to people, and if those people seem real, I will watch it happening. We will push other people toward them. We'll bring in product experts. You know, you can't-- We stopped counting leads that just came up to our booth as pipeline or as opportunity. You know, we certainly don't create an opportunity in Salesforce for that, or that would be silly in our, in our case.
[00:29:24] But we do take anyone who is serious, seriously. It's again, I am not gonna convince you to buy our software 'cause you enjoyed kicking a soccer ball. But on the flip side of that, though, someone who enjoyed kicking a soccer ball at your booth may have gone back, and all of a sudden they're, like, really sweaty and they're saying to their friend, like, "Where were you?"
[00:29:41] "I don't know, this, this company, the pink one over there, Funnel Leasing. They had this, like, World Cup thing." And it's like, okay, now you put that in my head, I'm back at home later, I happen to see, you know, something online about you guys. Like, I love, uh, tying this back... And I, I think this is where we're going, by the way.
[00:29:55] You're gonna have to do more things like this in the AI era. You're going to have [00:30:00] to do things that are less measurable, less direct response, less immediately trackable. Like I, I'm really relating to a lot of the stuff you're talking about. Totally. Another pretty fun one that we did was last year we had a Western theme booth.
[00:30:13] Everybody likes cowboys, everybody likes Western. We had, you know, engraved cowboy hats. You could get at one of them. But it was basically we had two booths. We had a saloon and a jail, and on the jail we printed out wanted posters of all the top prospects we wanted to speak to, sent it to them in advance and said, "Come get your poster."
[00:30:32] You know, we burned the edges of them to make it look like old wanted signs that said, like, "Wanted Dave for spending too much on bad AI," and just, like, plastered it haphazardly on the side of the booth. People loved that. It was such a good way to get people to come to the booth and then interact with us.
[00:30:49] They all took pictures of it. They put it on their LinkedIn. That worked. I like taking notes of these, and it's like, my big theme is, like, we gotta get back to the, the timeless stuff. How do [00:31:00] you think your background in PR and comms, uh, has shaped who you are as a marketing leader today? It's all positioning, getting people's attention, right?
[00:31:12] That's what matters in PR. I started off in DC working for super political activists who basically had no money, and they said, "Here's $10,000 for three months of work. We need headlines. We need to be on the front of the Wall S- The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, New York Times. We need to be on ABC News, CNN," all these things when people used to watch TV.
[00:31:34] And the only way we could do that was guerrilla PR tactics, and coming into the National Press Club and singing songs or doing things out of the ordinary. Coming up with cheaply made TV spots that were super controversial, and we'd run them in this one tiny market that cost us nothing, and then send that to CNN and be like, "We're running this.
[00:31:56] This is on the air right now. You can check And it was [00:32:00] technically, right? But like- Yeah ... kind of punching above your weight. I love that. I did a... One time I bought a billboard in, like, a really off-market city, and it was, like, 800 bucks. But we had a customer there, and they went and they took a picture of it, and then we posted on LinkedIn, and it got, you know, hundreds of thousands of impressions.
[00:32:16] I'm like, I basically just hijacked the billboard game. Hey, it was on the internet. It was, it existed. It was real. Who's to say? Yeah. So your background is rooted in basically, like, how to get people to give a shit about something, how to get people to pay attention, and then you, you slot in the marketing, you know, tactics and whatever after.
[00:32:33] That plus just consistent messaging. How do you talk about your company in a way that people remember it, that's differentiated, that you're taking a stance on an issue? And you gotta repeat it, obviously, constantly. What's the mistake with, like, consistent... So you know, everybody loves to quote or talk about, you know, Marc Benioff, and he would talk about how once you nail the story, you're not changing it every three months, you're not changing it every quarter.
[00:32:58] Uh, and then a lot of times [00:33:00] you're dealing with the sales team or someone else, and they're like, "Oh, we're sick of this," and it's like, no, repetition is key here. How do you not shift things so much? Like, how do you know when you land... Is messaging a constant evolution, like you're always working on it? Is it a point in time where it's good enough and you have to ship it and do it over and over?
[00:33:16] What are, like, the through lines in my rant there? I think messaging always needs to shift. The question is how often. And I think you know when it needs to shift because your website doesn't immediately speak to the things that 10 out of 12 people mention on a Gong call in the last two months. Is your website the home base for that?
[00:33:37] Like, when we talk about changing our messaging, is it, is it the homepage? I think your website is your top salesperson. It's where anyone is gonna default to go if they don't know where to go. So yes, that needs to be your tip of the spear in terms of where you're going, your positioning, what you represent today for sure, and where you're going.
[00:33:58] I think with AI, [00:34:00] like, it is, in my world, speeding up the shifting of the messaging, right? Because initially it was one thing, then it was agentic. Now we're starting to talk about orchestration, right? That's become a very important thing in our world. So it's the world is shifting faster. You need to adapt to it because if you're not- Especially with AI, like people think of it as this magic that if you're not actively participating in the latest gimmick, you're gonna miss out.
[00:34:31] And so there are budgets for that. There are people who are going to give you more time if you can speak to it. I think where you lose people is if you seem obsessed with the latest gimmick and there's nothing behind... You demo something really cool. In my world, if you demo something cool but you don't have workflows and automations and integrations with all the tech stack that they use today, smart operators will basically say, "This is a waste of time."
[00:34:59] You are gonna get [00:35:00] some people who are just like, "Whoa, that's so cool. Let me buy that thing and push for it." I don't think those folks are gonna be at their jobs for too long, and I think they're gonna have a lot of questions to answer when you didn't fully vet something that foundational in, in our tech s- in our world.
[00:35:15] Um, but yeah, it, it does... By the way, there's a hummingbird that just came to my window a second ago They're everywhere. You do need to shift. You do need to shift more often, but I don't think your message three months from now should look polar opposite to the one today, right? If there's not a consistent theme, people are gonna just lose what you represent in their mind.
[00:35:40] It should tie together, but the way you talk about it can and should shift. What about how you've hired? One thing I like to hear from is when I talk to a VP of marketing, marketing leader, okay, you came up from PR, and so now that you've built out your team today, you have, you know, team leaders underneath you that have different skill sets.
[00:35:59] Have [00:36:00] you built a team? You know, did you have to bring on a really strong ops person or demand gen person because that was not your background? Or, you know, the CMO that came up through demand gen needs to find a really strong brand and comms counterpart. Do you have any lesson there? I hire people that are very smart, smarter than me, really specialized, good at something in particular that I don't know, and I am all about team culture.
[00:36:26] If I have people on the team who are not team players actively looking to help, the kinds of folks who say, "You know, that's not really my job," or make you feel that way in their reaction. Maybe they don't say it that overtly, but it's clear that that is how they're feeling. I don't want those people anywhere near my team.
[00:36:44] How do you pull that off? I agree with you completely, and this is something that I talk about internally with, with our company is I want to... There's so much nuance in, like, company building and marketing, and it is sometimes it's like, well, that's not someone's job, but, like, you know how to do that. Can you just help out?
[00:36:59] And [00:37:00] like, this person's out. Can you just do that? Do you feel like you need to have people incentivized to do that? So for me, it's now as an example, there's no individual goals on our team. We have a small team right now. It's all based on company, and so we have if we hit our company revenue goal, you can get a bonus that's X, and I want that to be a driver for people.
[00:37:19] But I, I don't think I've, I've nailed that. So I hear you on the philosophy of it and the, the theory of it. Any advice on pulling that off? Yeah. We haven't really leaned into the financial side of that particularly, but I think it's two ways. One is it comes from me. I will be the first person at our events to be on the floor physically assembling a podium if it needs to be done quickly, right?
[00:37:43] Like, I wanna set an example that there are no jobs beneath any of us. We can all do these things if we know how to do it. And then the other part is it feels very flat within my organization. So we have, I have one-on-ones with everyone. We have weekly calls with the team, [00:38:00] and particularly on that weekly team call, it is so clear that if Alex has an idea, it's not gonna be the idea if there are better ideas.
[00:38:09] Like, it is very democratic. People throw in lots of concepts, and they see, "Hey, my idea was way better than my manager's." That's pretty cool. We're now gonna do my campaign. The best idea will always win. I... People make fun of me. It's not, you know, we have a very, like, open, good relationship where everybody legitimately likes each other, can feel completely free to do what they're best at and offer new ideas.
[00:38:35] And so I think it's very empowering to the team to be like, "No one is above someone else. We're just all kind of working on our little worlds, and I have as much impact and influence on this as anybody." And I think when people feel that, they actually like what they do, and then they, without you having to ask them, they will go the extra mile 'cause they know that that's what's needed.[00:39:00]
[00:39:00] Let's wrap up with just any thoughts of philosophy. Where's the marketing job going? Are we gonna have a marketing... Are, are we gonna have jobs in five years? Do you have any strong opinions there? I do. I think AI is ultimately a combination of the most common things that make sense to everyone. And to my initial point that if you're not different, you're not gonna stand out.
[00:39:24] So the more people rely on this commonality that is giant LLMs, and we're all asking the same things of them, you're gonna look like everybody else if you're just throwing up AI slop and generating the same types of look and feel visually from whatever platform you're on today. And I think the uniqueness of humans is what- is memorable.
[00:39:49] It's what's differentiated. So if you're using the same tools everybody else is, you're not gonna stand out. And I think marketers who recognize that, who continue to be different, and [00:40:00] who bridge the gap, like we're all gonna get pretty sick of virtual this and that. You've gotta have in-person connections with folks.
[00:40:09] You've gotta be able to pierce this awkward Zoom video platform we're on and connect with somebody in real life. And if you can't, and you can't work well with other people, you are gonna be easily replaced by a common tool like AI for that thing. Yeah, I'm trying to pull this, uh, there's this clip about Ben Affleck talking about AI and just artists and creative.
[00:40:32] And basically he says like, the opportunity, and I think this is really true in, in marketing, is that like AI can't make true art because there's this actual ... The way the LLMs work is it's gonna optimize for average. These AI models operate on mathematical libraries of meaning vectors because, and they guess the most statistically likely next w- next word or pixel based on historical data.
[00:40:53] So you're never gonna have the like creativity and weirdness and randomness of a human doing something, and so [00:41:00] that's the whole taste thing. My only like existential crisis though is like that is true if it's humans, if we're, if we're humans selling to humans. If all of a sudden if it's like I have an AI agent, you know, I own a big apartment building and I need to find a platform, I'm gonna have my AI agent do the research and they're gonna talk to your AI, AI agent.
[00:41:20] That's my only I saw you nod your head. You know what I'm getting at? That's fair, and you do have to cover both bases because people will err on the side of, "Let me ask Claude what technology I should even be looking at in the first place." That may not be the extent. Hopefully you're asking other people and your peers what they use, but you have to do both.
[00:41:40] You have to cover that to make sure that those people are still coming in the door and you're speaking to them. But I think the part that sits with you is the feeling you have with that person when you're on the call with them, coming to their event, how thoughtful are they? Do they understand me and my needs?
[00:41:57] And those things only really come from [00:42:00] interactions with people until we figure that part out. So what's the role of marketing gonna be in 10 years? I'm not trying to ask everybody this. I just want people to listen and be like, "Okay, this guy's good at his job. He's smart. Here's what he thinks." Like- There are probably gonna be more mid and higher level people and fewer super junior people, which is tough, 'cause I'm not sure what those folks do.
[00:42:21] I can't solve that. But because Mr. Eloquent Ben Affleck said it is averaging this commonality and giving you whatever the incremental next best pixel is, a lot of the basics are gonna be covered. You need thoughtful people who have good taste, who think a little bit outside the box, who know how to bridge things together, who see kind of what's coming too, because AI is not great at predicting the future.
[00:42:47] It just tells you what's happened thus far in this world. And I think if you're talking a little bit ahead of where things are going, speaking to what your customers care about, coming up with creative [00:43:00] ways to, like, leverage some of those cool tools that AI provides us, you're gonna be in a really good position.
[00:43:05] So I think the marketer that, this is what everybody says, but it's true, who can leverage those tools effectively to do the stuff that took forever and you couldn't get to without it, that person is gonna be very successful. I just don't know really what happens to folks who are just starting out their career.
[00:43:24] Yeah, I think that's a, that's a common trend in the, the CMO, VP of marketing that's powered with AI. I think you're gonna be able to do a lot more with a much smaller team, but I think there's going to need to be someone in the driver's seat from a marketing standpoint, and I would argue that the, the role of VP, CMO, marketing leader is more important than ever, and a lot of the Job is gonna shift back away from people management, performance management to, like, I think it really matters that the marketing leader has taste, is creative, is a strong leader, has a strong point of view, which are all good things [00:44:00] if you got into this job because you like the craft of marketing.
[00:44:03] Where I know that once, you know, once you reach a certain stage and scale at a bigger company, most of the job is meetings, one-on-ones, not a lot of creative output, and I think the, the future is, is somewhere in the middle. Amen. All right, Alex Howe, great job. Go find Alex on LinkedIn. He is SVP of marketing and growth at Funnel Leasing, one of our great members here in the Exit Five community.
[00:44:26] And, uh, just good to riff with you. There's something, man. The fact that there was a hummingbird trapped in my office and you have a hummingbird on your arm is... There's something in the air right now. Maybe the Exit Five competitors are sending the hummingbird drones to all of our locations to see what's going on, but I don't think that's it.
[00:44:42] That would be impressive. And I'll be at Drive leading a workshop. Oh, that's right. You are speaking at Drive. God, terrible, terrible. That's exciting. I'll tee you up. Don't worry. You'll tee me up. Thanks, brother. That's perfect. Three months from now, Alex is gonna be in Stowe. Did you have a little stint in Boston?
[00:44:56] I was trying to look at- I, I was like, did you live in Boston for a little bit? I did. That's when I was at [00:45:00] Fama. It was not my favorite place. I am, uh, much happier just south of LA. All right. Boston, catching some strays at the end of the pod. We love it. All right, man. Good to see you. We'll see you at Drive, exitfive.com/drive.
[00:45:12] See Alex there, see our team. It's gonna be an awesome event. We'll see you soon. See you there.
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