How Marketers Can Deliver Real Short Term Impact with Josh Shulman

00:03 Welcome to another episode of Marketing for Marketers, the series where we talk to the experts who know what it really takes to create marketing that moves the needle, not just the metrics. My guest today, Josh Shulman, a marketing leader with deep experience working at the intersection of brands, demand and revenue. And now recently, Josh had conversations with CMOs from Pavilion and he posed a very simple but pressing question. How can marketers make real short-term impact beyond just driving leads? Now the answers.

00:32 or lack of them sparked a set of theories and ideas that every marketing leader should hear. And I believe that's what we're going to be chatting about in more detail today. But first, Josh, welcome. Thanks for having me, Jamie. I'm looking forward to chatting. yeah, I mean, ultimately I'll just say it wasn't just the Pavilion Group CMOs that I wanted to ask this question. I went through some fun times with a couple of

01:01 previous experiences recently as a former leader of marketing departments. And we were always chasing, you know, the next big thing and kind of going down the funnel a little bit further. And it still ended up boiling down to leads. So I've been constantly trying to seek out the answer of how do we find and how do we achieve short-term really truly measurable impacts within a business.

01:30 And so far, unfortunately, lead gen has been the most common answer. Now it's not often that we have conversations about delivering short term impact because I think there was this movement that marketers were focused more on generating long-term sustainable, predictable pipeline, right? That's ultimately, I think if you were going to pick between the two, you'd probably go for that. But it's strange that we've almost entirely forgotten about.

01:57 short-term impact, the long-term sustainable is more the safer bet, where you've got more time to year results and stuff. So I'm excited to talk about short-term impact. I haven't read, listened, seen anything that's popped up in the last couple of years, at least talking about short-term impact. So it should be a good conversation. think it's because, you know, at the end of the day, you have marketing, which is always measured on long-term marketing has the biggest impact.

02:26 on long-term, so we want to be measured on it. But then you look at the average tenure of your marketing leader and it's especially now between nine to 18 months. That's short-term. So for an entire department that's measured on long-term metrics, we have to deliver something short-term. So that's kind of where I sit on this topic and why it's so important. So I guess question one, obvious one is.

02:56 We referenced the CMOs that you've spoken to, Pavilion being one of the channels. When you asked that cohort of CMOs how marketers can make short-term impact, aside from the main answer that you seem to get, what other answers did you get and which surprised you the most? I got crickets for the most part. And really the...

03:24 part that surprised me was the fact that it doesn't matter how tenured a CMO, VP or head of marketing was or is. Their constant answer when you really press them for it was, hey, how do you get measured in the short term? So if you're making the 30, 60, 90 day plan and you're going through that review at that two quarter mark, what

03:54 are the actual impactable metrics that the rest of the C-Class is looking at. And every single time, despite whatever they might say in interviews, in agreed upon KPIs for that trial period or what have you, it always ended up falling back to some semblance of leads, be it MQLs, be it SQLs.

04:22 Perhaps if they're lucky, did, or I guess extra unlucky, net new logos, revenue signed. mean, I would say that kind of depends on lucky or not, depending on if you were able to achieve those goals or not. But I guess the answer, the part that really truly surprised me is that no one had an answer outside of what's been, what marketing has been measured on.

04:52 10, 15 years ago, which is the old model that no one wants to use anymore of Legion. That's what everyone is still measured on in the short term. what, um, what answers were you hoping for? I was hoping to get anything that might suggest, Hey, all right, Josh, you've been in three marketing roles over the past three years. I needed to find an answer to suggest, all right, listen,

05:22 I've, I wouldn't say butted heads, but let's say had kind of different language gaps between what I was aiming to achieve and what my CEOs wanted from me. And I was pushing towards financial mystics. So pipeline revenue opportunities. And then what I would suggest is leads are leading indicators of success, but they shouldn't be what we're.

05:51 ultimately measured on because, it's too transactional. It doesn't actually paint the buyer journey. So I was hoping for some sort of, hey, I figured it out. This is what's moving the needle. This is what makes the board happy. This is what makes my CEO happy. And this is what is getting me the most successes nowadays. Hey, the alternative is you gotta just don't look at

06:19 marketing metrics, you have to be able to pick up their balance sheet, their P and L and say, all right, what's your CAC? What's your customer lifetime value? What are all of these other things? And think about what are you strategically doing as an entire organization without actually looking at the marketing side? So she's like, there's a wide gap. There's a huge gap of what happens in between those two. And I'm trying to find a solution to say, all right, in my next role,

06:50 Or as a, you know, fractional, how do I show, all right, this is where the impact is going to come in? Why do you think drive leads has become the default response or continues to be the default response, even though you reference, you know, 15 years or marketers have been thinking about leads or whatever for far too long. It's tangible. It's something that you can go to your market, put some money in.

07:19 and you see some immediate results. So the likes of sellers, SDRs, BDRs, they are measured on how many meetings are they creating, how many actual opportunities convert, deal close rates. Those are immediately financial and you can immediately see your ROI. Leads have, in theory, a very similar framework, but they don't paint

07:47 the picture of every marketing touch point that happens. Podcast episode, for example, that's not gonna drive leads immediately. You might, if you have a spectacular episode that really kind of resonates with someone well. Podcasts, for example, are a great brand building exercise and that falls into this category of a hundred plus.

08:13 potential touch points with your target audience that you're getting before they convert into an opportunity. So I think leads are just easy. They're measurable and they're attributable to a very specific activity. And you can pour a lot of money into it and immediately see the impact. But the returns on that are diminishing at an exponential rate.

08:41 When's the last time you realistically downloaded a PDF and you left your information and when a salesperson reached out after you downloaded the top of the funnel PDF asset, Hey, are you interested in purchasing? No, I'm never like, just wanted the information. You'll know if I want to buy from you. So leads are a broken system of attribution. That's not applicable with how the customer journey operates today, but

09:10 When you're reporting to your financial department, your C-execs, your board of directors, your investors, your VCs, they all just want to see something tangible to say, hey, we saw an uptick because you're likely going to have some baseline. All right, listen, we're generating a hundred leads per month. A new marketing person comes in. They are, okay, listen, we're going to, we want to see 50 % growth in your first three months.

09:41 Great. So that means that they're immediately expecting that you're going to start bringing in 150 leads as opposed to shaking up the entire system for how things operate. So it's this kind of weird balance. And I don't think that anyone without the right argument is willing to let go at the end of the day of leads as their core metric. in summary, I was trying to think of a nice way of putting it or a

10:11 of like label. it's kind of like the easiest obtainable agreed currency from a point of view of, you know, everyone in the business ultimately does think that a lead is going to go somewhere. We're all aware that leads become less and less, you know, like they talk about currency value and the dollar dropping and whatever. The currency's got the value of that currency declined year over year, but it's still an agreed currency.

10:41 a recognized currency, let's Yeah. And it's entirely the marketer's fault at this point. We've dug ourselves into this hole where we communicate with our own terminology that no other department uses. mean, when's the last time you realistically heard sales or CS talking about demand gen or recall or oh,

11:09 Vibe code, okay, vibe coding may be getting a bit bigger because CS is maybe building their own tools at this point, but who knows? But marketing has built its own ecosystem of terminology that no other department will ever understand. So we've become order takers and we kind of need to slowly reclaim our position at the revenue table. And this means.

11:37 slowly but surely convincing our boards, our teams that leads are not necessarily the solution. They can be in a couple use cases, let's say PLG, but most scenarios not. Okay then. So in your view, what is the real difference between creating short-term impact versus just producing short-term activity? So I guess it's the impact is...

12:07 activity is just busy body, right? You're just producing stuff for the sake of producing stuff and impact is quality versus quantity, let's say. Yeah, I think it boils down to, are you working to just keep your job? Did you join an opportunity where you can actually thrive and develop the marketing, the GTM ecosystem that can actually develop and sustain? Or are you building a system

12:38 that will deliver growth over time. if you're not able to move away from leads as the core metric outside of potentially a leading indicator of success, then you're pretty much still doing checkbox marketing. Because if you're not making the adjustment from leads to what the financial models might suggest, then you're still just the order taker. Unfortunately. So I think this

13:08 Impact versus activity. Yeah, you know, I think everyone wants to kind of take the cool new thing. Everyone wants to jump on the podcast train. Everyone wants to jump on the thought leadership train when it comes to LinkedIn or any of these other platforms. But those things all take time. So they're going to default to checkbox marketing.

13:35 to ensure that they can deliver some sort of impact to make their role defensible in a place where they can be made redundant or cut off at the nine to 12 month mark, is realistically most orgs in the B2B space have a sales cycle of six to 12 months. So you've not been able to survive a single sales cycle. So that's.

14:04 incredibly challenging. And I think that's why marketers more often than not lean towards the activity-based initiatives versus impact-based. Cause your tenure is too short to really make the gamble on longer-term initiatives like focusing on CAC, CLTV or sales cycle.

14:32 Senior leaders spend 70 % of their budget in the first hundred days. Now taking that into account then, what are some specific plays marketers could run in that first 30, 60, 90 days that actually connect directly to pipeline? So we're talking about the impact here, not just activity. Well, there's the fun marketing answer, right? It depends on the industry, depends on the target audience.

15:01 Used to be, I used to be a little bit of a hater on events and field marketing because I thought the ROI on those things was a little bit falsified. was another one of those games of Bgen. Like you're just scanning tags for unqualified accounts, but done correctly. When you create a small scale event, you only invite the folks you want to chat with. Creating events can be a quick.

15:30 tactical win because you're putting yourself face first in front of your ideal target audience. And then the other side may also be customer marketing. So investing heavily in really getting to know the customers to understand what are their pain points. I understand that at a certain threshold of startup scale up where you've not really defined the ideal customer within your

15:59 a customer base because you could have some really bad customers at a certain stage. If you're even at 5 million ARR, you can have some really bad customers or limited diversity. So yeah, it's, difficult, but I think at least in my experience, that 70 % of investment, which I still stand by to this day.

16:25 perhaps I would have spread it out a little bit more evenly just for my own sanity, had come into hiring. So team building initiatives, essentially, which I think is the not often spoken about expense within your marketing team. When most folks talk about marketing budget, they're talking about how much are events going to cost? How much is your ad spend?

16:54 How much does influencer spend? All of these different variables, but very few folks actually consider, all right, what's the overhead? What's the cost of the people on your team? And at least in my experience, the largest cost within marketing team development in the first three to six months has been team building. I want to bring in the right folks to build the ecosystem, to build the motion that'll fit what I want to drive for a given organization.

17:23 So I think it's kind of finding the balance between those two. To your point, events, ad spend, purchasing leads, those are all tactics. Now, if you want to take the strategic approach that is more expensive, understand and learn what the exact requirement of the business is in order to reach that target audience and bring in the right folks to assist you in doing so.

17:52 Or perhaps you are that person to launch that initiative. So if we're talking about a strategic impact to the business based on that key expense in the short term, it's going to always be people. It's always going to be people in one way or another, either hires, agencies or freelancers. So if you had to pick one specific play to directly, um,

18:21 influence pipeline, what would it be? I would organize a customer marketing event if possible. So getting together a handful of customers, I think you need a minimum of two to three. And then in the same conversation, inviting between three to five of your biggest target accounts.

18:48 have them sit in the room and just have an open conversation about the ecosystem. As little selling as possible, just build this ecosystem where trust is the first and foremost conversation and engagement with having your brand in the background as the facilitator. And what I found is that time and time again, if you have the right ecosystem with your customers and you brought in the right ones, they'll bring you up

19:17 without you needing to prompt them to do so and they end up being your advocates and you end up having an additional champion from someone who actually uses your products and service. It's effectively like going to Google or Yelp to getting that real testimonial, except you're not reading it through the already heavily filtered digitized version, which is case studies. You're getting it directly from someone.

19:46 unprompted and in a much more native format. The additional benefit is that's a fairly low cost experience in total. You don't need to book a major booth or exhibit hall. Find a location where those folks exist. Book a restaurant, book a meeting room or coworking space and organize this get together. Depending.

20:11 If it's an enterprise, you might want to put a bit more to make sure the experience is high end. But at the end of the day, that's going to be a lot less expensive than putting a hundred K behind ads, 300 K behind exhibiting at some major trade show. And gives you a lot of potential learnings because you as the organization should be there as well to hear what the customers are saying. You'll have that immediate feedback loop. So it ends up being

20:40 win, win, win for marketing, sales and CS all at once. Now you've listed a few different tactics and I think we're in a climate where marketers have a ridiculous amount of options available to them in terms of where they focus, know, AI, know, chat GPT-5 can create new apps nowadays. You can do custom GBTs, can do agentic workflows, plus all of the traditional

21:11 additional tactics and strategies. How should marketers go about choosing where to focus when quick wins are needed? how do they, I guess let's use the 30, 60, 90 day again, how do they look at the ecosystem and go, that's where I'm going to focus in order to get the quick wins.

21:34 It's all about the fundamentals. mean, we talk about AI, we talk about all of these agentic models, all of these different tool sets, but we're forgetting that in order to use them, we need to have our fundamentals down for how do we actually apply these in our day to day? So the very, very first step should be doing an incredible deep dive on what

22:03 is the ideal customer profile, the ICP. What is the target customer profile? And at least the one that I like to use and not many folks like to use is a minimum acceptable deal size. So to understand which tactic, which strategy to apply, you must understand the fundamentals of who are you reaching and why.

22:31 Because if you don't, you're going to end up running the wrong systems wrongly got the wrong. Here's a very specific use case. My very first job, I worked for an ad tech company called ShareThru. So they served programmatic advertising. Still do. And their target audience, expectedly, is mostly marketers. Marketers spend all of their time on.

22:59 LinkedIn at this point, perhaps Reddit, perhaps all the other social media apps. But if we're talking about business, they're spending most of their time on LinkedIn. So if you're a marketer coming from that ecosystem and then you suddenly enter a new space, like again, my experience, video technology, which is a completely different ecosystem, the target audience changes. No longer are we targeting marketers, we're targeting broadcast engineers.

23:29 Product managers, CTOs, engineers, CTOs, product managers don't spend their time on LinkedIn. If we're putting all of our efforts into targeting these folks in a go-to-market motion that worked for us before for a completely different profile, then it's going to be a complete miss. So the very, very first thing to do in those 30, 60, 90 days.

23:58 is have as deep a possible understanding of the ideal customer profile, why it's been selected and how to best address them. So that should also come within at least a high level understanding of what does the solution do for the pain points of the target audience. I know that's not like as very specific answer here, but I think it's quite variable and

24:25 I think too many folks are skipping over the fundamentals nowadays. I don't know how many sites I've come across that suggest, hey, we're the next unicorn. You browse through their site and then you cannot for the life of you really figure out who this solution is for. So every single job I applied for, every single opportunity I've sought out, it's been right. I don't think that they have their ICP defined. Maybe that won't be the project that we work on, but that's going to be a core

24:54 foundational step. in terms of where to focus then it's focus on what you already know is working. focus on top to your ICP accounts and then there's various tactics that you could employ to target said ICP accounts. there be, you've given theory on where to focus from a

25:22 I guess process point of view, if you were to, if you were to answer that in terms of a channel or strategic, um, or strategy, what would be the answer to the question?

25:37 Lowest hanging fruit, as I'm finding out, I'm not a huge fan of this, but lowest hanging fruit is getting in front of as many eyes as you can. outbound ultimately is one of the best solutions. But sorry, that also doesn't necessarily answer your question about strategic. It's, hey, understanding that internally, your board, your C level, they are your target audience as well.

26:04 You need to adjust the way that you communicate to hear what they need to hear. think about this from the perspective of financial modeling. So be able to map every marketing tactic and activity to what's the end goal and how does it play into the entire business initiatives, which this goes back to my initial thought.

26:34 of hey, how do we measure on the short-term successes? And I wouldn't even call this so much as a theory as much as it is a proposal, both to marketers and to our internal target audience alike. The proposal is we should, at least in the short-term, be measured on conversion rate deltas. So, for example, you have a couple different conversion rates throughout your

27:02 different revenue funnel. have your MQL to SQL, your SQL to opportunity and opportunity to win. So I'm not suggesting we get rid of any of those individual stages because those are critical to paint some semblance of a customer journey. But you do have that conversion rate between it. So how do you measure your impact as a marketer across that stage when you come in and join? The conversion rate deltas.

27:30 What was the conversion rate before you joined and what was it before? If for example, the conversion rate from MQL to SQL used to be 2.5%, you came in and now it's 5%, that's immediate impact that you can show and adjustments you can make. And there's a bunch of different activities throughout that every different stage that can help you pump up

27:56 those different percentages and create that impact. We've talked about short-term impact, but there's always going to be an element of balancing short-term impact with, balancing the immediate pressure from delivering short-term results with the ultimate goal of delivering long-term predictable pipeline. So there's always going to be this internal argument for a marketer of, I need to deliver quickly to show my worth, prove why I'm here to...

28:25 Um, you know, build up that rapport, uh, give yourself a little bit of that internal brand that you spoke about. then there's always going to be the angel and the devil, the angels then saying, but don't forget, don't forget your long-term brand building. So how do you balance that pressure, um, for delivering like immediate results versus long-term brand building?

28:53 I think it comes down to transparent project planning. So if it's not necessarily a campaign, it is setting that initial KPI with your leader, with your CEO and saying, Hey, this is what we're going to achieve. And preparing that project plan of this is what it's going to be with each iterative step. Let's call it phases and what the deliverable and how it's going to be measured will be at every phase within that.

29:23 process. essentially chunkifying how do you work and ensuring all of it is visible and understandable. And that's kind of where I go back to try as little as possible to apply marketing terminology to it. So I think it's a bit of give and take. One of the first things that I would immediately promise

29:53 to any CEO or any leader is that, hey, within three months of me joining, you can expect that nothing's going to change. Because those first three months, as much as possible, with the exception of maybe a couple of experiments, depending on budget and leeway, as someone who's coming into an organization new, to come in and make immediate changes, that means you're going to fail immediately.

30:23 Because you're not understanding what works, why it works, or what doesn't work and why it doesn't work. You need to be there to sit and learn for the first three months. So setting correct expectations and then what are the next steps after the expectations are completed. I think really it's just a setting a project plan that shows exactly what are the steps going to be and what the expected deliverables and outcomes.

30:53 of those particular deliverables would be. And I think in the first three to six months,

31:00 Unless you're staying within the same ecosystem. You went from one competitor to another or tangential somewhere that has a partnership ecosystem and you already know exactly what works in that given industry. I think coming in and flipping things on their head, that's just a recipe for disaster. So taking the time to learn the product, the customer profile.

31:29 the pain points of the target audience, that's going to be the biggest success. There just needs to be clear transparency in the expectations and what you can actually do. you think it would be worthwhile? think this is a tactic that we've used internally where you give an estimated resource split between like, as in where your brain capacity is basically dedicated to say like, okay, we're it's 50-50 or 70-30 weighted towards short term. then 30 % could be.

31:59 30 % of your time each week. So 30 % of the hours you're working is dedicated to long-term stuff. you think that would be relevant, valuable? Absolutely. That's an idea I wish I'd known about and used on my own. It's something that I guess I'm applying now as I'm kind of trying to build up my own personal business where I would say I'm spending something like 80 % of my time on long-term.

32:29 Cause short term, what am I going to do? I can post daily on LinkedIn. That's short term that takes maximum an hour per day. Ultimately everything else goes into building a business plan and activation, go to market strategy. But as things pick up, I'm going to need to switch to actual deliverables. So that's a great way of thinking. It's not something I've personally applied, but

32:56 Maybe not cognitively applied, but I think that would help a lot with work balance to understand how do you devote your time and prioritize your responsibilities. Of course, there's prioritization exercises you can do. So what's going to deliver value based on your KPIs today, but this kind of percentage split is a great idea. love it. Yeah. Cause we use, I use deep work blocks or at least I use

33:26 locks in my calendar, each of them is colored. And then obviously in Google calendar, you do get the percentage split based on the meeting category or type that you've assigned to work blocks. So you can look at the end of your week or start your week, whether whenever you do your planning or your retrospective, actually I spent 50 % of my week in meetings or I spent 30 % of my week focused on the podcast or whatever. it's a, yeah, it's quite a good way of doing it. Um, especially how would you

33:56 How would you allocate differently if, for example, your calendar's overbooked with meetings when you know you need to be doing deep work? How do you reduce meeting count when it's, for example, executives who are filling up the calendar? Two things. think number one into, I call it like, protect your calendar with my team. So I always suggest my team put in non-negotiable deep work blocks every single day. So.

34:27 those deep work blocks will change in terms of what you do in them. I block out your lunch, block out your morning deep work, your afternoon deep work. And then that only really leaves a few select 30 minutes or 60 minutes slots in your day that people can actually book meetings. So that'd be number one is protect your calendar. And then number two would just be, um, transparency. If you understand the percentage of your calendar that's weighted towards meetings or, um, you talk about noise, think Stephen Barlow calls it.

34:56 noise versus signal. And he basically said, just spend 80 % of your time on the signals and 20 % of your time on noise. The open transparency of look at my, I'm spending 70 % of my time in meetings. How do you expect me to deliver on impact if I'm 70 % of my time is in meetings? Um, and I think they would respect the level of transparency in terms of you knowing how much you're spending in, in, uh, each type of meeting or whatever.

35:27 think that was the most important learning I had in my career after my first experience as a team leader. When I joined, was like, oh yeah, great. Look at all these meetings I made. then it felt a little powerful at first to suggest, all right, listen, like I'm spending all my time, like half my time in meetings with management, absorbing information and the other half of my time.

35:55 giving that information away to the team. And then I found that I had like 10 to 15%. Okay, obviously my maths was terrible in that particular example, but let's say it was 40-40 split on the meetings and then the remaining 20 % was devoted to working. Goodness, it felt powerful in the moment, but then...

36:18 the end, felt like, okay, did I accomplish anything? Did I get anything done? And it's a learning. really wish I came across much sooner in my career. I know now, especially the deep work that I want to be doing, what that would mean, what that would look like. But that's such a critical learning. And I'm glad that you bring that up and that you keep that with your team. Yeah. It's like trial and error. It's something that you said I've learned the hard way that when you said that it, um,

36:48 kind of make sure if you're important or powerful. can definitely agree with that sense of you get to a point in your career where you've reached leadership or whatever the tier is in the business. And you're like, Oh, well, I know now, cause I'm in leadership that I'll primarily be on calls and I'll just be delivering PowerPoints and data and stuff like that. And then you actually get there, you realize, now I've still got work to do. It's not just presenting work. Um, so yeah, it's learning the hard way, but yeah, definitely protect your calendar.

37:17 Um, okay then, so if you could give one directed to a CMO or a VP of marketing under pressure to show results fast, what would it be? I hate it. I have to answer this with it depends, but let me add the caveat of it depends on how good your data is, but I'm going to assume that you have decent enough data that you can look at your history over the past 12 months. If you're not there for 12 months, then hope that they have data from your predecessors 12 months.

37:47 Take a look at that data and see, all right, what worked. Spend as much time as you can, let's say a few hours digging into why that might've worked. Perhaps it was a certain set of outbound messages that your SUR PDR team was functioning. Understand why that works. Try to replicate it in a sense that suggests, all right, hey, this is how we're going to get some quick conversions. Perhaps that quick fix that

38:16 quick win could be creating some enablement material for those SERs and BDRs to be able to progress through their sequences, through their calls much more successfully. They'll say, all right, listen, I wouldn't have been able to make it that call without this script that you prepared for me. Maybe. I mean, I don't know how good marketers are on call. I know I'm terrible, but I think it's just...

38:45 Do your best not to reinvent the wheel. think the best action item I can say is take a deep breath. Understand the status quo. See what worked before and see if you can exploit that. If not, build on it. I hate it, but there's always something trending somewhere. You can run some sort of click-baity exercise to kind of fill the pipeline in one way or

39:17 I'm a huge fan right now of these, let's say more community and engagement based event style get togethers. So maximum of 20 people in attendance. Invite only. Okay. Yeah. You say invite only, but you can have people register. But the idea is you, the primary group of people are folks that you've invited. So make it really, really personal. Build that experience.

39:46 Bring the folks both from your team, your customers and your target audience to really exchange ideas and then have yourself, your brand as the facilitator for that experience. And I guarantee at least one of those 20 will turn into an opportunity because of those 20, you should be inviting at least one that's somewhere towards the end of your sales cycle within the decision-making phase of like, eh.

40:16 Do I convert now? Do I make the purchase? Maybe that kind of in-person engagement helps really move the needle. We've got a guy called Deepak who looks after community events and things like that. We've had some really, really good successes with those small, like micro events, whatever you want to call them. And I think the dinners seem to work really, really well for us. you know, pick a pretty bougie restaurant in the city that you're visiting or near close to the event venue.

40:43 where everyone's gathering already and then you host 15 to 20 people, you have nice food, good amount of drinks and you just chat. And it's not anything forced. It's not like you must chat about business and you must chat about deals. It's just generally industry themed topic of conversation, but it's just a very informal evening. And that's definitely worked well. We did notice though that the, some of the sales cycle lengths on those are pretty lengthy as is.

41:11 the average nowadays anyway, we'll see like some, think dream data talk about.

41:18 It's back dream day to talk about something like 250 plus days in terms of the average B2B sales cycle from first touch to close one. thing with those events is sometimes it's quite a lot of upfront investment for senior leaders to understand results and it can take a long time for them to come through. But we've noticed a positive ROI on those. Even if it was marginal, there's definitely a positive ROI. That's why my prioritization for those type of events.

41:46 is try to bring in the accounts that are already in the late stages of your sale cycle. that are kind of dragging their feet. So bottom of funnel micro event? At least a few folks that might be at the bottom of the funnel so then you have the opportunity to say, right, we're all sitting in the same room. Let's get some folks who are knowledge.

42:15 owners and pass that information further along. And moving from there, you can also invite folks that are at the top of the funnel to equally kind of, you end up speeding the cycle along for the top of the funnel folks and maybe giving a nudge to the ones at the bottom of the funnel, giving them some extra attention. It's a very delicate balance.

42:41 But what I'll say is, at least from the events that I organize in this ecosystem, the ROI there is a lot easier to defend because the cost of doing that type of event is by a significant margin, less expensive than doing trade show presence or running a massive Google ad campaign that some agency recommended a

43:09 Pump a hundred K into Google ads or LinkedIn ads per month. You know, if you're putting 300 K into ads, what's a 15 K in person meetup with these high priority accounts going to cost you? Probably a lot less than it's probably going to help a lot more in the interim. couple of questions would be, we spoke about short term impact. We've, um, spoken about, or we've touched on dashboards and reporting and tracking and doing deep analysis.

43:39 I think one of the most important skills for a senior leader is telling stories and that's telling stories with data. So how would you suggest marketers can better communicate the value of the short-term wins to C-suite? mean, if we can't abandon the lead topic, do it. But if not, then it needs to be oriented like how you tell any kind of story. You start with the what. So this is the scenario.

44:09 you can describe some additional context including the data points. You next need to describe the why you got there. So what's your assessment of what the status quo is and then how do you address it? So those three simple questions, what, why, how, and being able to answer that effectively in let's say 10 minutes or less, I think will make you stand out.

44:38 You have to be concise. You have to be able to drive this up to revenue, to pipeline, to entire customer lifetime value, if you can, to show that you're capable of thinking in the long term. And then showing what that means in iterative, the iterations of the different changes. Because we want to be

45:08 impactful in the long term. in most scenarios is only impactful in the long term. Brand doesn't happen overnight. Demand gen doesn't happen overnight. Recall does not happen overnight. But leads can happen overnight. it has to be this balanced communication of, listen, we're going to drive an increase

45:35 in our average deal size which will drive also increased customer lifetime value thereby impacting our ARR. That's long-term plan. We're going to get there by doing these short-term activities which will therefore be viewed through the conversion rate deltas. So having a few key metrics at your disposal

46:03 as reliable as they possibly can be will be what changes their narrative. So I like to go to, as I mentioned, those three questions. What, why, how, and then circling back to reiterate in a very short and concise, this is the entire situation. So essentially in storytelling, it's like the story sandwich. have your intro.

46:33 your three statements, your conclusion. So if you can tell that story in a way that's compelling, using financial metrics as exciting as those can be, then I think you'll have a lot more success in that senior boardroom discussion. And in terms of format, obviously you may have a boardroom discussion, you may have a monthly board meeting or monthly quarterly QBR or whatever.

47:00 In terms of these short term wins, I guess there would be an argument to share them more frequently than those. So one thing that our now CEO does very well is the four to five minute loom style videos to give an update on a specific initiative or project. We found those really work really well over and above just a Slack message or some sort of slides. Um, because you can just digest that four or five minute video in your own time, um, without jumping on a meeting or a session.

47:29 the user can share their screen. that's definitely something we're playing around with in marketing where each of the guys in my team now share a video update at the end of each month covering off the wins, lessons learned, failures, which helps to build internal brand as well. So that would definitely be a good tip. It's so much more human. We're overwhelmed now with how much AI can do and it just almost feels robotic. So when you have something that's video first,

47:58 It's highly engaging and then creates a little bit more personality and has the opportunity therefore also to show off the skills of the person. If you had just presentation format before looking at Excel sheets or Google sheets, it's very one dimensional. Having videos like Loom gives folks the opportunity to expand on that.

48:25 One final question, which I think would be very, very useful is what are some of the common traps that marketers fall into when chasing quick results and how would you suggest they avoid?

48:40 Oh man. I think I'm gonna get some flack for this one.

48:48 I try to avoid it at all costs. In fact, it's one of the first things I try to cut when I can. I avoid SEO like the plague, no. I don't. Main reason why is because I have not found an SEO solution now, especially with the rise of GEO and everything with AI.

49:17 SEO agencies, SEO experts, everything that they do is just ultimately a toss in the air right now. We don't have the answer to what's going to work in this ecosystem. So if you want a short-term win, it's going to be the CEO's, most CEO's favorite tactic, cut your expenses first. And I would cut SEO first.

49:47 Until there's a definitive answer for what needs to happen next. Stop making those SEO oriented blogs. I would say SEO, bring it down to the bare minimum. Make sure that the website is built correctly. Your site maps are established, but you don't need to be making SEO content anymore. You don't need to be filling your website with tons of blogs with

50:17 nonsense keywords. So you want the shortest term impact on the ROI of your marketing department? This is my personal opinion, but so far I've not been actually proven wrong for now. When we have more answers about what SEO will look like in this generative AI landscape, think realistically we'll have some more definitive answers within six to 12 months, but you know.

50:46 for the rest of the calendar year, get it out of here. The only argument I would make to that is bottom of funnel stuff. everyone, you hate to see it, but the comparison pieces, so top 10 cognizant alternatives like in 2025, because that does tick all the boxes of traditional as well as traditional SEO. So I think the only caveat to that.

51:11 I would agree with you in terms of the primary and secondary keywords, the clusters, the hub and smoke methodologies, that sort of stuff. But that's when you're moving up to middle of funnel and top of funnel. If you just produced, if you had five key competitors and you produced two or three different variants of competitor pieces for each of those five competitors, that would keep you busy for a few months anyway. And I think it's a pretty safe bet. And I'm only making that argument based on data.

51:40 Actually SEO is one of our best performing channels, but it's taken years to get it to that point. But one that we saw quick results with, or stuff that we have seen very quick results with in terms of within a few months, it's generating 60 book of demos a month is bottom of funnel pieces. Yeah. So start there. That's pretty low effort anyway. It's very easy to produce that bottom of funnel with AI as well. So it doesn't take very long, low effort.

52:06 Okay. We've only got one minute left, so I'll give one answer to this would be a common traps would be don't assume that something that worked well in the past will work again. Because you've covered this quite heavily in the episode of you have to know the industry, the, where people hang out, the ICP, just cause LinkedIn works really well for a lot of sass. doesn't mean it's going to work well for cyber security sass or whatever. So don't assume that.

52:31 The gem that was delivering you solid leads two months ago will deliver it just cause you've moved. don't make assumptions. Uh, that would be my answer to that one. But I've got a hard stop, unfortunately, but it's been a really, really good episode. One of the long ones actually, which is nice. So I appreciate you jumping on and thank you for, um, chatting about short-term impacts. Like we said at the start, it's not something that you actually see spoken about that often. So, uh, yeah, thank you for joining us. for having me, Jamie. It was a pleasure.

53:01 And for those listening or watching, will catch you in the next episode.