Alright welcome everybody to another episode of Stack and Growth. It's Friday and that means it's jam session with Carl and Cassidy. Carl welcome. How you doing?
Doing good Cassidy. Good Friday. Ready for the jam session. Yeah, it's been a while.
We've missed a few Fridays. We got to get back on our consistency here. Content consistency. We're not consistent.
Yeah, luckily the rest of the team has been picking up our slack. Seeing a lot of content flying out from them. So that's good. Hopefully they've missed us a little window.
Yeah, I'm sure they have. So what we want to talk about is this thing that just bugs the hell out of me. And I think you probably need to just talk me off the ledge. So, you know, I see pretty much every company running a marketing program that's about around lead gen.
And when I say every company, it's like B2B companies. They're running lead gen. When I say lead gen, I mean like they're doing work to capture leads. That they then want to get to the sales team to try to sell to people who don't want to buy.
So that's what I mean by that. And then the same company is running an outbound strategy where their sales team is going out to lead to don't want to buy and try to find the ones that want to buy. And so when I look at this, I step back. I'm like, this seems as to me.
It seems crazy. Like why is the company one company doing these two separate motions? I just can't figure it out. I posted about it.
I'm scratching my head. Maybe I don't get it. But I want to talk about that today. You okay with that Carl?
What's your thoughts on this? Yeah, I'm like, I'm a salty old dog or like a point of view. Well, first of all, yes, you are. But that's like the side of the point.
But I'm not going to talk you off the ledge, Cassidy, because I'm on the ledge as well. First, I don't even know. But I think we both need help. But yeah, it is S9, I think.
I think that's just a perfect word for it. I think here's the thing. I think back in the day, I don't know, five, 10 years ago, before there was zoom info and before there was cognitiveism, I think there's a lot of merit to that strategy, right? Hubspot popularized it, put out great content as we magnet and you know, you've got an email, you know, enroll them in cadences, email marketing, nurture them, score them, send them to the team whenever they reach some kind of arbitrary score.
I think that makes sense when you just wanted to increase your database size. Like, I don't know, you remember, like, that used to be a thing where it used to be like, how big is the database, like how big is Hubspot or Salesforce, how big is our CRM, how many contexts do we have that used to be a thing? But today, it's like, you just purchase the entire plan worth of a database in a monthly subscription. So why do companies keep paying for the email addresses that they already have access to?
I don't think it's like 30 to 50 cents for these emails, Cassidy, in zoom info or rocket return, cognitiveism, and then to spend not just the conversion, what is it? I mean, you're a marketer, I was a couple hundred dollars per conversion through something like LinkedIn. Not to mention the content that you have to spend money on and the people behind that, right? It's like a pretty bloated infrastructure just to get an ebook out there.
It's a lot of work. And so I'm just as baffled as you are, frankly, here. I'm gonna say one more thing. I think it's actually so asinine because not only do they not have any buying intent, but they're not even neutral about it.
They chose to go to your website and not talk to sales, but submit their information for something else. It's almost like they're not only not saying nothing, they're saying, I'm not interested. They're saying I'm completely capable of filling out a form and I'm proving that to you, vendor. I'm gonna fill out this form instead of the one that is talk to sales.
Like they're literally saying, I'm not interested. It might love that when you say it like that. You know, and then the market on the other side is, no, I mean, they just don't know how. So like they really want, like they're signaling to me when they download my ebook that they really want me to send them a bunch of nurtures or get it to an SDR team to reach out.
That's what they really want when they download my amazing ebook. It's not the kind of intent there. Yeah, there's a intent for sure. You have to want to buy my product because they read my content.
Yeah, it's just like, it's literally an anti-blind signal. You know, it's like, no, I've chosen. And so here's the thing. It hurts companies because what you can never build, Cassidy, a long term, like live event strategy that might turn into like an epic podcast because you just like burn every single person who decides to go to a webinar, you burn the hell out of them.
They're not going to come back for webinar number two or live event number two. Like it's sabotage. It's self-sad. I don't even know what to call it.
It's acid on. Like you said, you kill all chances of anything long term because you are teaching everyone that comes to your crappy webinar that we will hammer you. Like what more clear message do I need to receive as an audience member or as a part of your ICP that I should never sign up for anything again with your company? I think it's common sense.
I'll get it. I'm going to run a webinar and instead of doing it to educate my community, I'm doing it to collect a lead so I can then try to sell you something because you showed up to this event. It makes no sense. I don't understand.
Like this isn't marketing. But yet, this is pervasive in B&B marketing. This is literally what everybody does. Now I understand when you get all linked in, sometimes it feels like people don't run this motion.
But then when you analyze company after company in B&B space, 80, 90% of them are running this motion. Oh, for sure. 98% of them. You're being too generous there.
I mean, there's really only a few enlightened, I think, marketing teams and companies that are doing it the way that we talk about doing it. I think of who I think of. I think of cognitive. I think of any of our customers.
We're talking about a very small cohort. We're talking less than 100 companies on Earth. I don't know if that's dramatic or not. But our customers plus it's dramatic.
But we're talking about a couple hundred companies maybe doing really focused modern demand creation and have for the most part abandoned lead gen. Because I think there's a lot of companies that try both. They still do it mostly lead gen. But they're like, yeah, we create demand.
It's like 10% of their marketing strategy. So it's like, let's even give them a benefit of the doubt. But how many companies are just, I don't know. And to think just from like, here's another thing Cassidy, marketers, okay, they're gold on maybe contact information.
Like this is, we talk about this a lot of refilling. It's like, they kind of do what they have to do to not get fired. And unfortunately, a lot of times it comes down from above them, where it's like, hey, the gold is MQL's. Right?
We see this sometimes. A lot of the times. So it's like, okay, let's give the marketers a pass. What about like when you're the CFO?
And it's like, wait, I'm spending $300 for an email address for somebody that we actually already bought their email address and a sales team has it and they're actively reaching out to them. Like, I don't want to let the CFO off the hook either. It's like, is this this is simple math? You know, this is third grade math here.
So how do you reconcile even the basic unit economics of this? Yeah, let's just break that down for a second. So what happens on the marketing side? These marketers sit in a room, it's up in there, and they try to figure out what's the next great ebook we're going to write.
So the brainstorm after brainstorm somebody graphs up a version, you probably send it out to an agency to turn it into some nice glossy PDF. You have revision after revision in the company. So your team of people are putting in a month, two months of effort to like get this into the email. You need the email nurture.
You need the forms. You need everything that needs to happen. Operation needs to go behind this. Yep.
Then you know, after spending all this time, you throw it like you mentioned, paid behind it to amplify, distribute this. You know, whatever. $200 a conversion or whatever it is, some crazy number. Then you collect this email address now because you got it and you're patting yourself on the backlight.
You've got all these email addresses. I then maybe give it to an SDR team. So I hired a bunch of junior people over here to go through these emails and go to the website. And I'm going to go through this email and start calling people up and sending them nurture emails to see if we'll get on the phone and meet with us.
And we know by running this analysis across hundreds of companies that it doesn't convert to pipeline. It doesn't convert to revenue. And to your point, you're spending hundreds of dollars per email, contact, let alone the opportunity cost of using an entire team to build this content strategy. And there's your sales team sitting there going, I already got this email address.
It cost me $0.35. Thanks. And to your point, I find that people don't want to say this to folks. I get off and blank stares back like nobody has thought about this before.
So your point, where's the CFO? Where's the RevOps person? Why do people not understand this? Why is the sales team and the marketing team not talking to each other?
Or we're missing something, but this is a dominant marketing strategy. The leads that we get from marketers suck. So we're building outbound strategy to go off and do the same thing. That's why outbound, like literally we have software that's like marketing automation software now, except it says outreach on it instead of HubSpot.
And now the sales team is just doing email nurturing with cold calling to the same emails and not seeing a lot of success over there. Although outbound sees, I don't know what our data says. I think it's pretty similar kind of success rates as lead gen on the marketing side. So it's like we're running this, Cassie, we just had a Piphany here, but it's almost like we love marketing loves lead gen so much of the company thinks that it works so much.
They're like, let's do it twice to the same emails. Let's run this strategy twice. Let's just use different people to do the same exact thing and just see who wins or something, you know, who's 10 years longer or whatever, who gets fired like first or whatever. It's like the most twisted game ever.
If there's any marketing teams listening to this and you've made it this far, seriously, here's my thing to you. I personally, I will not expense this. If you can prove to me that your lead gen program is profitable and you're going to have to show me data, we'll go under NDA, we're going to go through this. I don't know, I'll buy your whole team like a pizza party or something like literally up to $1000.
I shouldn't have said that. I'm $500. It's in value. Like I want to see it.
How many have we seen Cassie this year? Hundreds. How many of these analysis have we done? Probably close to 200 this year.
You're to date. I still, I look at most of them. You know that Eric does and stuff like that. I do some of them.
We get the team to do some of them. I still haven't seen one. I'll be made a believer. I just want to see one.
I want to see one. We spend this amount on lead gen and we get this amount out of it and it's worth it. Not only is it worth it, it's the best use of this money. We can't get more ROI from another program because it's not just the cost.
It's also like the opportunity cost. It's like, okay, you could spend $100,000 a month on lead gen and break even maybe, but it's like, yeah, you could go spend that somewhere else and 5x your money. That's even crazier thing to me. Even if it's barely unprofitable, even, it's not the best use of this money.
There's two parts of the conversation there as well. But my challenge stands. Pizza party, beer party, whiskey, whatever you're into. For the whole marketing team on me, if we can get together and you can show me your data, that your lead gen works.
I'd love to see it. I would change my mind. I would quit with my mind. I would quit with my mind.
I would quit with my mind and say, you know what, I'm going to start a marketing agency that's lead gen because it works. I'll do it. Carl's throwing down the gauntlet. Pizza party, whiskey party, whatever you need.
Career change? I'll just quit marketing. It's a total career change. I just think I'll do something else.
I'm done. If someone can show me that it works. Let's go. Challenge.
Ow. It's out there. Yeah. I mean, I think we see a lot of data.
Yes, the conversion rates are extremely low on outbound and on lead gen. But outbound works because the cost structure is so much different. It's so much different. $300 a require a lead versus $0.35.
Right. It's totally different. And also, the humans that are doing this are a little bit more affordable as well. You got a bunch of marketers that are potentially making six figures versus a bunch of entry level SDRs.
The unit economics are completely different. Not only is the headcount more affordable, but the infrastructure that goes into the process. It's much faster. You need a person, a cell phone, and a database.
With marketing, you need e-mail automation software. You need designers. You need people. You need writers.
You need is so expensive. So let's go through some questions. I posted this. I pulled some of the questions off the post.
I have my own. Let's start with this one to you, Carl. But if marketing is not doing lead gen, what should they be doing? I mean, if they don't know the answer to that, maybe they shouldn't be doing anything.
Maybe they should leave the company. So I'll answer it. For the ones that want to stick around with their company and genuine what I want to learn. I'm just being facetious here.
They should be educating and then going back to education. I want to sound like cliche. They should figure out like, okay, we already have e-mail addresses. Let's stop worrying about capturing e-mail addresses.
What is it that we want to communicate to the people who we believe are the best fits for our product? That could be a variety of things. It could be, this is helping them do their jobs better. This is like jobs to be done model.
What do they need? If I'm targeting Carl, sit front line sales leader, what do I know that Carl doesn't know that he would find valuable? I mean, it's really that simple, right? And I coach sales reps in the same way.
Like if you don't have something that you know that they don't, that is valuable, it's really difficult here to create value. That's what value is, right? So that's the first thing as a marketing team. What is it that we know?
What insights do we have that are worth sharing? That would help Carl or the CSO, CSO, CSO, CSO, CTO, engineers, whoever. That would help them do their job better. Okay.
Now you have what you want to say. Now the next thing is where do you want to say it? So where do they hang out? It's not simple.
It's not always pay chance. It's not always necessarily like a way to run ads to get the message in front of them. Maybe there's communities. Maybe there's something else.
So getting the message to where they're at and just doing that. Here's the rocket science part. Just do it every single day. Consistent execution of the basics.
That's what you should be doing instead of prioritizing the capture of email addresses that you already have in your CRM. Start there. So let me get this right, Carl. Your content strategy should be, figure out something valuable that you can educate your target audience on.
Say it every day consistently in the channels where your audience hangs out without any obligation to give an email address or whatever. Versus sit around in the room for a few months, package up some insights that tend to be not great insights because you don't actually know what your audience needs to understand. So you spent so much time writing an e-book that you forgot to talk to a customer and figure out if you actually even know something that they don't. So yeah.
Exactly. Let's assume you actually have something interesting to say. You're going to do this not every day. You're going to do it once a quarter and you're going to put a gate or friction there so the audience can't get it.
So only the desperate. Only one out of 100 people that see this are going to fill out the form. So even if you had something amazing to say, one out of 100 people will get to actually read it generously because you're asking for an email address. And I'm like, I'm thinking about this.
Where else does this happen? Like, if I want to buy a car, is like the auto, you know, is Tesla gating their content on their website and like forcing me to give an email address or are they showing me everything I need to know about their car to buy that car? If I'm going to buy a house, big purchase item, right? Yeah.
I go to like a rent fit or whatever. I can see everything about the house. I can go visit the house and I can check it out. But for whatever reason, we convince ourselves in the B2B world when we want to sell something, we got to make it so it's almost impossible to find anything else, anything out about the thing that we're going to buy.
No videos on a website, grab the content, any content that we do have is behind a gate. It's crazy. Like we have a bunch of marketers in B2B saying they want to be like B2C and I see this activity and I'm like, what is going on here? Well, also like, what is that?
What is it with that goal around wanting to be like B2C? Like banana republic hits me up every single day saying, last chance 30% off to get these banana pants or whatever they are, you know? It like, is that what you're trying to? I'm a little, that's a separate topic.
Maybe I'm a little conflicted over if I want to be like B2C or not because a lot of the marketing there is like just hammer me to death with a discount that is going to end until I buy another hat. So that's a story for another time. But Cassidy, here's the thing. Do we, here's a thought or an idea or whatever?
Do you think that like, we care, we think that an email address is super valuable, more valuable than the attention, like captivated attention of a person or more. You know, it's almost like that's what it is. It's like as marketers, the marketers that run the engine and just really are obsessed with the engine. It's almost like just this obsession with the idea that an email address is valuable.
You know, it's like who said that? Maybe that was true, like in the dawn of the internet, but like seriously, like we do everything to capture an email as if it's like this whole thing. If it's like this holy grail of information, if we get that, we're in. And I think I said that you worked at the company.
Yeah. That's why I'm like convincing an entire generation of marketers that emails addresses with a holy grail. Because that's how they made money to sell software. The more email you address is you put in the software, the more you had to pay the market on the hub spot.
You just you just said it. They trained an entire generation of marketers to believe that an email address is valuable. More valuable. No, no, no.
The most valuable thing that you could capture when you could buy it for nothing. You could get it for free. If you're patient enough, I could just wait for my rocket reach credits to reset every month and just get like 20 or 50 new email addresses for free. Literally, it's the stuff is free.
But still, we spend money to acquire something that is free. I don't even know how to, it's insanity. Instead of focusing on what, okay, so what's the alternative then Cassidy? Like what is the most valuable thing that we could capture in your mind?
If we're going to focus completely on away from an email address or phone number contact information, it's like a holy grail of capture. What is the most valuable thing that a marketing team or a company can capture from ideal customers? Yeah, I mean, you want to, the thing that you need to be focused on is getting people to raise their hand to want to talk to you about buying your product. So what do you need to capture though in order to get to that point?
Well, you got to capture their attention. That's it. Capture their imagination. Yeah.
Yeah. The desire. The desire is just emotional. You have to capture like emotional elements as well.
Time. Time. Their mind share. They're thinking about you.
Does your content or your ideas cause them to think like, that's the stuff that gets me fired up. It's so rare to find content like that, man. I'm like thirsty for content that makes my wheels spin. And when I come across it, what happens?
I share it with you. Right? You get harassed all week long. Like weird content that I find.
I'm like, dude, look at this idea. Right? But that's what happens when you capture someone's imagination or there is some kind of positive emotion, you know, or a negative emotion. Right?
Or you surface something that is like, oh man, I'm messing up. Wow. That was interesting. Like, I'm angry at myself for doing this or that, because I didn't know this bit of information.
But think about how that would fundamentally change how I market or even sell or even go outbound. Right? Because I think that outbound, like Cole's calling called emailing is literally identical to lead gen. Like marketers think that they're like better than sales.
Sometimes I think it's like Cole's calling is gross. I'm like, it's literally the vanity metrics almost the exact same. One is fake meetings and activity and the other one is email addresses. But I already have, right?
There's a lot of overlap. But think about how it fundamentally changes what you would do. If you went out on the street and said today I want to capture five email addresses or five phone numbers. Right?
I think it'd be a dating scenario. Right? I want to ask some other person that I believe is desirable or whatever I want to go on a date with. I want their phone number or I want to capture their imagination or their attention in some way.
These are two very different approaches. You know what I'm saying? Depending on that goal. I don't think people realize how dramatic the difference is.
If I want five phone numbers from different females as quickly as I can, I'm just going to like go run through a grocery store and just ask as many women as I can. And if I ask 100, I might get five. You know what I'm saying? Like if fundamental, but now you say, okay, you're going to find your wife today.
Right? What I think of all the things that I did to pursue my wife. Fundamentally different strategy. You didn't find your wife in a grocery store?
I didn't find her running through the grocery store. You know? Maybe go scary, do you run into a grocery store and ask them when they're from the grocery store? Oh man, just hulking around a grocery store.
What's your phone number? What's your phone number? But seriously, again, a hilarious example, but like think of dramatically different approaches. I don't think people really think through like when you change the goal, the roadmap to that desired goal is completely different journey.
You know what's going through my head? It's lead gen is not marketing. When I heard you out remind that conversation of what we're trying to do and still, and somebody if you're not doing lead gen, what you described or what we described was marketing. Lead gen is not marketing.
If you're not a marketer. Outbound doesn't sales, right? You see that a lot. Same thing for sales.
Outbound is not sales, right? Outbound is outbound. Lead gen is lead gen. It's not marketing.
It's not sales. It can lead to these outcomes potentially, but it barely ever does according to the math and the reports. So here's one that makes me mad. Well, you know, the CEO wants us to drive leads and MQLs.
It's the CEO's fault because this is what they want the marketing team to do. And when I hear this, it just makes me want to throw it up. Because the analysis, if you want to do it, if you really want to look into this, it's so clear to flush your money down the toilet. And I don't know a CEO in the world when you show them the data that we put together for our clients is going to say, no, I want to keep doing that.
Look at this, yeah, this doesn't work. We're flush your money down the toilet. We're getting no return on this. Yeah, let's go do something else.
But marketers either can't do that analysis or unwilling to do that analysis. Yeah, or yeah, yeah, absolutely. Or they just like, there's so many problems with that. Right?
There's just a lack of leadership. It's like, you know, I think there's a certain camp out there that's like, oh, you should leave that CEO, you know, or find a CEO that gets it. I actually disagree with that. And I think there's some scenarios that are extreme in which you're in the wrong place.
Like the people around you are just not smart people and you just need to get out of like a toxic environment. That's not what I'm talking about. And I don't think that's what you're talking about. Most CEOs are not marketers.
They've never done marketing, right? A lot of them come up through like the operations world, actually. They're CFOs or they're COOs and then they become CEOs. Like they really don't know a ton.
Maybe in the tech space there's like salespeople who become CEOs and founders. But largely, most of these don't actually understand marketing. So for you to just kind of like wave a white flag and be like, well, I better go out and get him QLs because I better go get her contact information. Because my CEO says that that's what he wants or she wants.
Like, okay, well, look, you said it, Cassie. Like you're not a marketer then. You are a database builder or something. You're a database enricier, right?
You're not a marketer. So I mean, that's an area where I think is like simple education. What does a CRM say? Because a CRM always tells the truth.
What does a CRM say? And again, it's common sense that no CEO actually wants leads. It makes me crazy. You just have to say this out loud.
But no CEO wants leads. Even though they say they want what do they want? They want the value of this company to increase at the end of the day. You know, they want Revit.
They want pipeline that closes. They want to exit this company one day and make money and be rich and wealthy and pass that wealth down to their families and their employees. So just to lay down and kind of die whenever you get a CEO saying something that's clearly incorrect, it is really just kind of telling that you're probably not the right marketer for the role, unfortunately. Yeah, marketers complain that they want to seat at the table and they can't make this case.
Like you don't get a seat at the table if you can't make this case. No, because you said it really well. CEOs and leaders of company want growth. They don't want leads.
Leads is a proxy because they don't know any better. They marketer's give me more leads. But the real thing is give me some growth. Give me some revenue.
I'm not a marketing expert. Don't take me literally. Go figure it out. I think it's leads, but I hired you, the six figure salary person to tell me what we need and to go again, drive growth and valuation of the company.
So, yeah, it's fascinating topic. So one more, Carl for you, because if it's not the CEO's fault, it's the sales team's fault. Let me tell you why. What else are we going to do with the SDR team?
If we don't have a bunch of leads for them to call? It's all sales fault, man. You run the SDR team. I need to keep your team busy.
It's not about revenue or pipeline, qualified pipeline. It's going to keep the SDR team busy. The most junior people in our company were worried about them, Carl. We need leads for them to do their job.
It's your fault. Yep. It's my fault for sure. Definitely want to keep the SDRs busy.
Again, I'm going to have 1 million email addresses in a database that we bought for them. They can be very, very busy for a long time. That's my answer, I guess, to that. I don't know what to say there, Cassidy.
It's like, I want the SDR team busy too. I want them busy starting sales conversations. The fastest path to that is for them to call down the list that I already purchased for them. The slowest path and the most expensive path is for them to wait for one out of 100 people to see an e-book and download it and then call them.
If you want your SDRs to be busy, just give them 33 cent contact information and let them be as busy as hell. I have this vision in my head as a marketer that's coming to Carl. Carl, tell me your audience. We have to figure out how we can get in front of them and who they are and get their email address.
I've got a list right here. I put it together in five minutes. Here's my, here's where I want to contact. It's not a mystery.
These thousand or 10,000 companies, here's a job title and here's a frickin' name and email address. Can you help me get in front of these people? They're mobile number. Here's their link in.
Here's their Facebook. You see where they went on vacation last month. You know, it's like, the list is your strategy. I think that sales teams are pretty good at building lists for the most part.
I think marketers actually can learn from salespeople in their list building because you see a lot of these audiences set up and link in Facebook and they're awful, right? And it's like the sales team actually is pretty good at building lists because they've had to, right? If not, they just call a bunch of bad numbers and stuff, but it's a separate topic. That's exactly what I would do.
If I was like VP of sales, some sas company, I'd be like, here's the list. We've run all these email addresses through zero-vats. They're all validated. Most of these are mobiles.
Text them. Do whatever you want. Stay busy. Get pipeline.
Why would we beat that one up pretty well? I don't know what more to say. I want to hear from marketers. Again, my challenge remains I want to hear if anybody's made it this far, which kudos to you, but any marketers that have made it this far, if you're the lead gen cleaner king and you've somehow crafted not on Legion, we would genuinely be interested in seeing how you made some kind of high volume gated lead gen program profitable for your company.
So that is an open challenge until the end of time. I would love to see it and talk to you and have you on this podcast. I love that call to action and I'm going to put out one more. So Carl has a call to action out there for the folks out there who are listening here like Carl and Cassie and what the hell they're talking about.
I crush it on Legion. I'm going to prove it to Carl and get my $1000 pizza in Scotch party. I have another one though for the first person to reach out. If you're somebody who believes who's locked into this strategy in their company and they believe in their heart that it doesn't work and they're struggling to prove it, reach out to us and we'll help prove it for you.
First person reaches out to me to listen to his podcast and you're like listen, I know it's not working. I need a little help being able to prove it doesn't work. Reach out to us and we're happy to help you do that. That's our other call to action.
Done. It's a good one. You're more positive than me. Pizza pie.
That's not as fun as a pizza party in the Scotch. Pizza party is a little bit more challenging. You are more helpful. I didn't offer to help anybody.
I just offered to feed them alcohol pizza. So I'm glad that you balanced mine. Always here to help you out man. Alright, anything else?
What else happened this week? Anything else you want to discuss before we jump off this podcast? That's it. We hammered it.
We hammered it. We hammered it. We'll see you out there for the jam session next Friday. Next Friday we're going to try to bring this LinkedIn live next Friday with all the special guests on the show if she's willing.
I think this is where we have us on jam. How do you build a strong outbound strategy? Let's see if we can do that on LinkedIn live. We figured it out this time.
But we'll see you all out there next Friday. That's it for second growth. Happy weekend everybody.