From Adversaries to Advocates: How to win friends (and budgets) with data
Funnel Reboot podcast
I can't prove it, but I think many marketers wish they could improve how they're perceived by corporate leadership. I have felt this way in more than one role, and racked my brain on how to fix it. I've entertained everything including coming to board meetings with a dozen custom-branded donuts. Thankfully, the a solution I have come up with isn't extreme and it doesn't require donuts. I was recently given the chance by a local association - the OPMMA - to give a talk and I picked this problem. I hope as you listen to how I think it's solved and the three moments where this...
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Using CRM for Total Recall, with Brandon Drake
Funnel Reboot podcast
We humans like conversations that keep moving forward. Every time we share some detail about ourselves, we expect the other person to remember it. If they bring that detail back up in our next interaction, we feel pleased and want to keep that relationship going. Conversely, we get annoyed when they blast us with messages we had already said didn’t interest us. This is severely problematic for us sales and marketing professionals. The sheer volume of people and details we all encounter is too much to keep straight in our outbound emails, let alone in our heads, and that's...
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The Marketing Growth Formula, with Heidi Hattendorf
Funnel Reboot podcast
Episode 233 In the 2009 movie “Up” there’s a golden retriever whose collar can translate his thoughts to speech. When Dug the dog first starts speaking, the main characters marvel at how smart he is, but expectations drop a moment later when he snaps his head around and halts mid-sentence when he hears a squirrel. We marketers are prone to Squirrel-chasing. Let’s be honest and admit that we get caught on a treadmill of activity without stopping to ask ourselves if it’s having an impact. How do we break this habit? This month’s book says it’s by creating a...
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Market Eminence, with David Newman
Funnel Reboot podcast
Episode 232 There is a quiet, enduring power in wisdom that resists the urge to conform. Wise people refuse to abandon their convictions. It’s not obvious who will be the Wise character in These Stories, the role often casts them as having lowly beginnings or in the shadow of others who are more powerful. But they speak out anyway, even if they are mocked or sidelined. Take: Don Quixote’s sidekick Sancho Panza, whom Quixote usually makes fun of, becomes so well known for his practical wisdom that he becomes a Governor. In the story of Sidharrtha, when the prince leaves his palace, he is...
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Sales and Marketing that’s Scalable, with Peter Fillmore
Funnel Reboot podcast
It goes without saying that the purpose of sales and marketing is to help a company grow. We create forecasts where revenue grows a hundred-thousand, a million, or 10 million dollars. But we expect to achieve that with incremental changes to our resources and tech-stacks. When Base 10 Math is used to express numbers that differ by orders of magnitude, we use exponents, noted with the letter N put in superscript (N stands for the Latin word numerus or number). N to the power of 5 is equal to a hundred-thousand, N to the power of 7 is equal to ten million. We don’t have to raise N...
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The Social Shift, with Katie Brinkley
Funnel Reboot podcast
Social media platforms can serve as both vibrant marketplaces and spaces for genuine social interaction, where consumers feel valued, while businesses boost engagement and sales. This picture may not look anything like the reality of social media that you see, but our guest will remind you that things haven’t always been this way. A short glance back of the Internet shows that in the year 2000 the Internet’s governing body actually had looked at using a citizen model to allow individuals who use the internet to kind of come together as a social contract and to decide how they would...
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Pushing back on AI campaigns with humans in the loop, with Lyndsey Maddox
Funnel Reboot podcast
Episode 229 We need to talk about what’s been happening with the use of AI on Google and Meta’s ad platforms. A few years ago, we were surgeons. We had the scalpel. We chose the exact keywords, the specific bid modifiers, the precise placements. Now? Google and Meta are basically telling us, "Hey, don't worry your pretty little human head about it. Just give us your credit card, a few grainy images, and a vague 'goal,' and we’ll take it from here." Performance Max (PMax) and Advantage+ are the ultimate "Trust Me, Bro" of the marketing world. They’ve turned "manual control" into a...
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Paid Traffic for Non-Profits, with Sean Moher
Funnel Reboot podcast
How do you amplify a message when you can’t lean on traditional justifications like “because we’ll make a profit out of this”? In the for-profit world, the justification for marketing spend is straightforward: you put money in to get more money out. But how do you amplify a message when you can’t lean on traditional bottom-line justifications? For non-profits, associations, and social enterprises, the "profit motive" is replaced by a mission, yet the fundamental challenge remains identical—you must find and keep your "customers," whether they are donors, members, or...
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Depositioning, with Todd Irwin
Funnel Reboot podcast
Episode 226 Positioning is an element that’s so foundational to Marketing, it’s taught in every introductory class alongside the "Four Ps" of marketing. Positioning is meant to describe the choices a brand makes to maximize how the market sees it. Positioning is very powerful because it can set perceptions that drive customer loyalty, strong demand, and the willingness to pay a premium price. But if all this is true, then why is the landscape littered with examples of where brands have flopped—cases where brand positioning actually caused a product to fail? Take...
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Tried and True Marketing Reads
Funnel Reboot podcast
Episode 225 At the time I’m recording this it’s a new year. This is a typical time when people plan what they’re going to achieve fitness-wise, financially and professionally. If you’re working on that last one and wonder about what marketing reads you should try, I have some marketing books that could do just the thing. There are Five in all. - Let’s dive right in. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
info_outlineEpisode 199
Today’s topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn’t concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it’ll shift things.
Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we’re now able to look at individual audience members and predict how each of them would act upon a message, and at the opportune moment we could have the message show up to each one of them. Goodbye analyzing what happened with crude audience averages, Hello to using detailed data to predict what’s likely to happen.
With AI holding such promise, why don’t more companies hand things over to AI? I had thought it’s held up by a lack of technical people who know how to do this, but our guest says we’ve had enough technical expertise - He himself was previously one of those data people, and his expertise wasn’t enough to do the job. He says AI initiatives are held back by those running business functions like marketing who haven’t made the business case and collaborated with the data people to implement this.
My guest is a leading consultant and former Columbia University and UVA Darden professor. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series, a frequent keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. In 2023 he authored “The AI playbook”
Let’s talk to Eric Siegel.
Timestamps/Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
00:01:37 Welcome Eric Siegel
00:01:56 Barrier we face isn't technical know-how
00:06:05 Despite a strong start - AI's been slow to spread
00:11:17 Process a business needs to implement ML
00:27:41 building a custom algorithm
00:29:45 PSA
00:52:32 The human-side of the switchover
00:54:03 Contacting Eric
Links to all people and concepts mentioned are in the shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site.