Benji Hyam’s Post

Transcript

that don't have a marketing background, that I need to hire some specialist in the very beginning. I need to hire a content marketer. I need to hire a paid ads person. I need to hire any of these people. To me, the right person is a marketing generalist, actually, who has a strength in one or two areas. So they have a broad enough foundation that they've held different roles in marketing, and they have some of this experience of getting feedback from the customers, doing messaging and positioning stuff, because I don't think there is a right channel mix at the very beginning of a business. I think you're constantly iterating, you're figuring it out, and then you're putting a little bit of fuel behind the fire and seeing if you can keep things constant while you're, you're putting more resources or money behind it. Then you're just trying to scale that one channel as much as possible. Okay, in today's episode, um, I'm the podcast host. Okay. So I'm, I'm the captain now and, and I am going to interview Benji and we're going to do a fun hypothetical that we think, um, not we think that is emblematic of conversations we have with a bunch of both our actual clients and a bunch of companies that we talk to in these kinds of lead discussions, um, about a bigger picture marketing strategy. Where do you spend budget? What kind of channel blend? And where should you focus? And we, as a content SEO agency, are just one aspect of it, but we inevitably get tied into those conversations. So here is the premise. Benji, you are the first marketing hire of a B2B SaaS company. That has decent growth so far Enough to sort of prove some level of product market fit Let's just say that in the hypothetical and then we can even discuss what if they didn't well also like what does that mean? Yeah, that's actually a good point and but they've grown to date on just kind of Random word of mouth and the founders the founders like multiple founders let's say or the founding team and the whatever is like kind of referrals and word of mouth and they Started a product hunt and their friend got them to trend on hacker news Or they have a friend at TechCrunch or something or whatever. And so now they're like, let's formalize marketing They hire Benji, God help them. And, um, and let's say you have probably their best hire yet, actually. Yeah. And you roll up your arms and start coding. God, that would ruin the product real fast. So, the, the uh, let's give you a budget. I don't know, you've been in those situations. My mind went to like I think the budget is irrelevant at this point. Oh, interesting. Yeah, like we can talk about that, but I don't even think that's important. What do you do? Let's start there. What are the first things you do? This is day one of your job. I actually want to flip it around. Instead of what I'm going to do, I actually kind of want to talk about it from the company's perspective. Like, what should they be looking for, even, in a marketing hire? Oh, interesting. And because I think one of the big issues is that the company or the founder, if they're not a marketer, often has a very different idea of what they want for marketing at this stage when they're hiring their first marketer, then basically what they should be thinking about. Uh, let me play as devil's advocate and say, no, they don't. Everybody just wants to grow. That that's my response. So yes, and I agree. But. Oftentimes they're not ready to grow and what I mean, they're not ready to grow. They're not ready to invest heavily in marketing channels if they haven't really had a marketing channel that's been proven yet. And so you gave the example of, let's say a founder, a company that's grown to, I don't even know you, you could grow to like, 500, 000 a million dollars. I've even seen companies at two, 3 million a year that have completely grown through their network and kind of word of mouth at this point, but they haven't really invested heavily into marketing and now that they want to build that marketing foundation out. And a lot of people have this misconception that if they've grown to those revenue amounts, let's say 500 million. Like, especially a million. If you've grown a business to a million dollars a year, often times the founder thinks we have product market fit. How could we have grown to a million dollars a year if we don't have product market fit? I think that. Clearly people want our product, they're buying it, so that, that 100 percent means we have product market fit. I mean, I can give you an example of a prior company that I worked for that was exactly in the same situation. The funny thing is I know exactly who you're talking about. Yeah, but it definitely did not have product market fit because they hadn't proven how to basically market and sell the product. Cold to customers who haven't heard about them So how the heck did they get to a million dollars then? Because they had a lot of connections through VCs and they had a lot of connections through the founder And so the founder used warm introductions to get in front of that person to get in front of the right people They were the head salesperson. They were really good at selling And then they tried to basically build out an entire sales team to replicate what the founder was doing. But the sales team doesn't have those same worm connections. They now have to sell into accounts cold. They didn't really have the right messaging foundation. So like, what, what is, what are we actually selling and how do we sell into these accounts? So like a lot of that process wasn't there. And a lot of the strategy for how to go cold into businesses wasn't there. They had figured out basically how to sell through warm connections, but they hadn't figured out how to sell through cold channels. So then they tried to basically hire a team and they hired like five people at once and they hired me to run marketing and we built out a marketing team and nothing had been figured out. At this point, like they hadn't figured out how to sell cold. So they're trying to figure out cold calling while they already have five people. They're trying to figure out marketing while they now have me plus a full team. And they're, they're under the assumption that they have product market fit just cause they have revenue coming in. Let's take this story, but go back to where we started. And I think I asked you some questions that got us off track. You just said, I said, okay, it's day one of your job. What are you going to do? And you said, I actually want to flip this back to the company and say, what do they want? And I challenged that and said, what do you mean? Like they, they just want to grow. So even in your story of this company, you said like they, they, they hadn't sold to cold audiences before it was all like warm. So they haven't figured out how to grow yet. And, and what I mean, and they, isn't that your job as the first, yes, but the mistake was, The founder hiring me to scale the business before the business was ready to scale. So in my mind, I'm coming into the business, I'm learning about the business, talking to customers, trying to figure out why they're buying, what the use cases, all the challenges from the customer's perspective to try to figure out then how we're going to message to them, how we're going to position the business, what our homepage copy needs to be. Does our, our homepage even clearly describe what we do? Is it all evident and stuff like that? So I think that step one is the marketer should be coming into the business to learn about the business and you need to figure out basically, do you have the right messaging to sell? to a cold audience, the right positioning and messaging to sell to a cold audience. Do you have prospects coming in that clearly understand your website just by reading it? Are there people clicking to sign up for a demo or a trial without you basically needing to explain the value props to them other than a single landing page or a homepage? That's what hadn't been proven at this business up until this point. So their website was kind of just like a placeholder and. The founder was the one going like going into these deals and basically selling but then The issue was when we had a team that was built to then sell they couldn't close deals the same way the the messaging wasn't clear like people didn't understand the value of what we were doing and so While they were able to open up some sales conversations like the pipeline wasn't there They couldn't predictably get leads in the door and close them At any sort of rate. And to me, it was because the product market fit was, wasn't there. When I brought this to the founder, they challenged me and they said, there's zero chance we couldn't have product market fit at this point, we're at like one or 2 million in revenue and they just didn't want to listen to me at all. And they were just like, focus on growing. And to me, the issue was the foundation wasn't built yet. And so what is that foundation? That foundation is the proper messaging and positioning. That when you basically put that in front of someone through any channel, whether it's content, whether it's ads, whether it's a cold email that it piques someone's interest enough to want to talk to you or come in and sign up for a lead. So that, that is like the number one thing that I think someone needs to figure out if they're coming into a new marketing role is what is the core value prop of this business? Who is the audience that I'm going after? And then, yeah, like what's the best way to, to sell and get this value prop in front of the right people. And at this point it's channel agnostic. That's why I said like the budget isn't really important to do, to do this kind of work. It just requires talking to prospects and talking to customers and trying to figure out what are the alternatives in the market? What is the core value of the service or the, or the product that they're signing up for from existing users? Like you need to just figure out that fundamental stuff in the very beginning. Okay. So if I can boil it down, which I feel bad kind of trying to be too reductionist to what you just said, but you're saying, make sure the positioning and messaging is right. And we can link in the show notes to this. We've written a couple articles, at least one on positioning where we kind of dove into this a few years ago, which is still very relevant now, going back to this hypothetical. What are you then telling the founders or whoever hired you? Like, what is your concrete plan of like, how do you do this? Like, do you buy some Google ad traffic, for example, to put a concrete hypothetical out there? Cause I've heard this happen. Who said this, is this some of the lean startup tactics or whatever of just like, you know, you, you, you, you create a landing page with some hypothesis of positioning. You buy some like Google ads for people Googling for whatever, like your software is or something or your product, and then you see who clicks to buy. In this case, in my hypothetical, in the Lean Startup thing, you like, it's kind of a fake landing page. There's nothing, there's no product there. In my hypothetical, there's like a product that has a million dollar revenue. There's like a demo. So what, what would you actually do? There's different ways. So yeah, what you're saying is good if the product is pre launched, but in your example, there's already customers, there's already a landing page, or you could even use the homepage heck. So, but what are you telling the founding team? Like I need this much time and this, and what are you going to actually do to test? So, so my first month in the business would just be talking to customers, nothing else, literally, I would just, I would call up customers or email customers and ask them some of their time. And then I would just ask them. Why did you initially sign up? Like what, what piqued your interest? What were you trying to do? What were you doing before? What other competitors do you look for? And you talk to enough customers and you start to find patterns of their spot. Like what is the core value that you find from our service? There, there's like a list of questions. Again, I can link to it. A lot of it is based off of Sean Ellis created this, um, product market fit survey. And so some of the questions that I use are taken from that. And some of them are just things that I've learned throughout my career, good questions to ask, to just understand the psychology of the buyer. And so in that first month, I'm talking to customers, just trying to understand their psychology, their pain points, what they're trying to do, why they're buying, and then basically I'm looking at our existing messaging and positioning and trying to figure out if that maps to what I just heard from the customers. that that's step one, then you're actually testing this. And so if your hypothesis is there's something off in the messaging or the positioning, then you need to basically change that and then retest it. So if you already have traffic coming into your website, if you already have some cold channels coming to your website, you can just change that and see if you're getting an increase in signups or demos or whatever. If you're not. You need to find a channel to actually go test this in. So you need to create some sort of messaging. It can be an article, it can be your homepage. It can be a landing page that basically sells the value of what you're doing. And then you need to get in front of the right people and see if you can drive conversions there. What's interesting is when you say testing, and for those that don't know, when I met Benji. I was running an A B testing agency, which I'm still running as like a shell of itself. It's like a small thing. Um, actually, aside when I met Benji, he just we met at a dinner, um, in San Francisco, and he had just come literally from the office. of that company with that CEO that doesn't, that didn't trust him. And, and you were in like a mood. Like, like, people who know Benji, like, Benji's usually a very chill, kind of, sort of San Diego surfer stereotype person. But he was like, he was like, you were like agitated because the guy had, I think what you had told me that I still remember was like, something about like, You had some landing pages or something and he was like, these are all terrible. And you were like, they're actually not anyway. So that's kind of funny. But when you say testing, I think a lot of people will jump to like, Oh, like, so like AB testing, you don't actually mean that. And as someone who has been a professional AB tester for God knows eight, nine years or something now, I actually agree with you. You mean just implement the change. On a page that gets traffic. And we're going to talk about this in a second or buy traffic or somehow send traffic to a page and then just watch and measure. I mean, we can give example, like concrete examples from when we started our business, because we kind of went through this exact same process. So for those that have been following us for a long time, they'll know that we launched a course. Man, probably a 2018 or no, actually before that 2016 as the first product ID that we were going to do. And. We were all excited about that. We had a small email list that we had built just from the traffic that with people that came to our site, we came up with the positioning of that, that course, we were all proud of it, thought it was going to kill it, launched it, sent it to like three or four, I think it was actually like 5, 000 people at that time. So we're like, Oh, we're going to get like a 3 percent conversion rate on this. And like no one bought. And again, that's just an indication that, you know, Our messaging was completely off. Like it, it wasn't that no one wanted the course because we could see in the replies to the email that people are saying, Oh, this looks so interesting. But when it came down to actually purchasing the course, no one bought it. And, and so what we did is we asked some of those people, Oh, you, you respond to the email and said, you were so interested why you didn't buy. And through a lot of those learnings from getting feedback from those prospects realize that. They, they felt like it wasn't for them. Yeah. The reason is we, we wrote it, uh, this is embarrassing to even say, cause in hindsight it was so off, but everyone makes these mistakes though. It's not even embarrassing. Like even, even people that are really good marketers, again, like this is the importance of testing things. Like you can have a hypothesis about what you think is going to work, but until you put it out there, you just don't know if it's going to work or not. And you have to constantly iterate and get feedback from your audience to figure out where you're wrong and then how to reposition things. But yeah, keep going. Our fundamental mistake of our course at first is we wrote it to the content marketer. Well, no, we wrote it. No, we wrote it to the company. We had just come off of doing workshops in person to basically train content teams, how to do our process. We got so much excitement from those companies that. We, and through that we were selling to the CMO or VP of marketing that was bringing us in to train their team. And so we assumed that the course would be the same audience that the CMOs and VP types would want to buy this for their team. And in actuality, the people who wanted courses and to learn what we were doing were the content marketers themselves or other freelancers or consultants who had marketing agency who wanted to basically replicate our own process. Yeah. Right. So the copy, what it sounded like from a positioning standpoint is we had stuff like basically the message of the course and the sales page was, you know, your content marketing is not really working. It's kind of like the message we have now. For our agency, but it doesn't work as a course. And I'll explain why your content marketing is not working. You know, this course will help you see why, um, blah, blah, blah. Like now you can measure leads, make sure that it's actually like working and measuring leads. And the CMO types were like, I don't have time for a course. Like, can I just hire you? Meanwhile, the people who were like the individuals who wanted to buy a course. They didn't want to buy it to help their company make more money. They wanted to buy it for their own career growth. So they were like, I want to learn this to either get more clients, be able to leave my job and just start my own thing like you guys have, or just do a better job or whatever. They were doing it like for themselves. And so, yeah, selling it with like, you know, you're losing leads and like the you, as you said, means the company that was off. But anyway, let's get back on track. When Benji says testing the positioning, what I was saying was he doesn't mean A B testing. And here's why. AB testing is looking for like these small differences with statistical significance and blah, blah, blah. Right. What we're talking about here is huge swings where you don't need an AB test to tell you. We're not talking about like 10 percent more, 20%, like in the AB testing that our, my agency has done forever, a 20 percent lift is that's like massive. You're just like, don't get that right. These are these like big e commerce shops or whatever, like, you know, there's not, there's not 20 percent to be had, but like, that's a separate thing. We're talking about like. Our previous version of the course, it was like, we've like had it like open for a week and we sold a handful. It was just terrible. Five, five or six. Yeah. And so yeah. And so it's literally working versus not working. And you, and you've said this a lot, like when you, when you have product market fit, it's just like, it's on versus off. Like you, you either are selling things consistently or just nothing is working and you're beating your head against the wall and you can't figure it out. And so when you're looking for these massive shifts, so let's continue. So you're saying you're going to tell the founders, look, on month one, I'm just going to figure this out. Let's say they buy into what you just said, like this, your pitch for why this is important and say, okay, um, so a month goes by. Let's assume in order to get to the conversation that I wanted to get to, which is like marketing channel mix and how to invest in it. Let's assume you find some kind of messaging that works because, well, maybe we can discuss that first. And if you don't, does that mean the company's screwed? Yeah, kind of. I mean, as to me, as a marketer, you can get into a business and realize the business is completely screwed. Because either the product's not good enough, there's not enough demand, they got something wrong in just their hypothesis about how they wanted to solve some certain problem, or the product isn't good enough and there's better competitors that operate at a cheaper price, and as the marketer, If, if the product team and the founder doesn't listen to this feedback and they're not willing to continually improve the product or here's what the customers are saying, here's what I think we need to improve to get to that product market fit part. And they're just kind of, um, stubborn and think, no, this is, this is the best product that we have. We're not going to make changes right now. That's not important. Yeah, you could basically get into the business and not achieve product market fit and just as the marketer be screwed because you know, you're not going to be able to affect change on the growth side in the proper ways. And I can tell a couple of stories. I know exactly what you mean. We'll tell a couple of stories. First of all, that is literally, I shouldn't say, Oh wow, because that's literally what we felt about the course. And for those that don't know, and we could, hopefully you can find and link to the story in the show notes, but, um, That's how we started the agency is we tried a few iterations of this and a bunch of people when we have, we have a thriving course and community now, but correct me if I'm wrong, we actually got the positioning of all that right after the agency, right? My memory of events was we tried this business positioning one and when we got a couple of those emails of the CMO types being like, Why would I buy a course? Like I need to then hire someone. Like, I'm not gonna take it. I'm like the head of marketing. I need to hire someone who's like a practitioner to then take your course and do it. Can I just hire you? And we were like, whoa, whoa. Like, we're not an agency. We don't have time for that, blah, blah, blah. And I remember having this kind of like, um, you know, for lack of a better term, like, come to Jesus call with you. You were like in Bali, I think still. And I was, I, I was in my, I was living on my mom's couch. And I was, I remember I was like pacing on the front lawn and you were just like, yeah, I was pacing in my backyard. I remember exactly what I was. We had this like wooden hammock and I remember like balancing up on it and not, and I was like, I have spent so much time on this ridiculous website called growandconvert. com. I have no money to show for it. I haven't been spending time on my AB testing agency. Like we need to do something with this or not. And I was like, Benji, Benji. Like there was some phrase that someone said, like, don't punch the market in the mouth. Like the market is saying, like, I want to just hire you. We have no business model. We have nothing. We've made 0 like you're back in the U S we let's just do it. And you were like, no, no, no. Like people don't realize how hard content marketing is to actually execute. Their expectations are not going to be right or whatever. Like it's going to cost a lot. It's going to take a lot of resources. And I was like, well, then let's just pick a high number. That's not, I was like, I was like, if they offered you a million dollars, you would do it. So there's some number at which we would say yes. And that's how we started. We started, I think at 6k and then 10. Yeah. So, I mean, that, that's also just a good lesson is just having the right. service or offering or product for the right customer. And so we had the right hypothesis in terms of coming into this business and wanting to solve this content marketing problem and knowing there was a need in the market for what we were trying to do. We had the wrong offering in the beginning and the wrong product essentially to, to, to give that to them. And we learned that the hard way through launching and getting that feedback in terms of, okay, If you don't want our course, like what do you need? Like what is valuable? And you're right. Like so many people came back to that email saying. We just want you to do it for you. We trust you. We've been reading your content. We believe in what you're doing. Just do it. And so we're like, okay, we need to start an agency now. And then it became figuring out what the right service offering is and continually testing that and getting feedback. But like, right after we changed that messaging and everything, we got our first two clients and we were off to the races. And then it's like figuring out that service offering, what's the right strategy and all that kind of stuff. But I. Yeah, and it took years, but like this constant iteration, especially when you join as the head of marketing is what's needed, whether it's a product and you're giving feedback to the product team, like these features we need to improve. We're weak here. Our pricing is too high. Our messaging doesn't, doesn't work. Really sell our core value props or the reason why we exist. All that stuff is what the marketer should be thinking about and doing in those first, I wouldn't even say it's month. That's like 90 days. Like I think people have the wrong expectations of hiring a first marketer and seeing them making an immediate impact in the first couple of months when they come in, the impact is going to be figuring this stuff out, figuring out what the proper foundation of the business is, not not let's grow to thousands of users in the first few months, because. Most businesses have not figured this stuff out before they haven't haven't hired their first marketer. Yeah, the reminding ourselves of this story is making me think like man, what a fine line between success and failure like We, we, we had something there, like something about this idea. And back then there was no pain point SEO, by the way, there was no like bottom of funnel, what we've come to be known for of just like do SEO, stop wasting time on traffic, find the high conversion of ones to do bottom funnel. We didn't even know that we weren't even focused on SEO. We did non SEO stories, but the idea, the core idea of. Your content marketing is not working because it's producing bad content that you're not proud of and it's not getting results. Like there was something there and we like thought we could position that as a training type product, either a course or in person and it just like, Wasn't resonating the way you just described, which is like, you don't need an AB test to tell you it wasn't working. We were just like, Oh my God, we have nothing. We have no customers, no one's signing up for stuff. This is not going to turn into a business where it's just totally obvious. But the core was there. And I wonder if that's kind of what is the frustration even with you and the CEO you were talking about. And I think you would disagree because I know you're. Opinions about that company, but it's like I wonder if it's like, well, we have a million dollars of revenue So like there's something like people are paying for something but to your point that business failed so they Basically got aqua hired. I think in folded the business after I think five years of running it because They were so stubborn about this. They weren't willing to accept that there were flaws in The product and the delivery of it To where they just kept beating their head against the wall and burning money, trying to sell a product that people didn't really want. And there wasn't a ton of demand for, and that wasn't sold the right way and wasn't messaged the right way. It's a great business because we've talked to someone recently who's basically doing a different take on the same idea and has had widely successful growth, but that business in the way it was run just didn't work. And. Again, if you're, if, if you don't have that foundation there and you don't have the product market fit there, you can have tons of funding. This business was funded very well funded, and they were just burning money on trying to spend money in marketing channels on sales people before they had the solid foundation figured out. And that's like the core lesson. I think probably what's happening there, and we will move on to marketing channels after this, but like. I think what happens is you, companies and products kind of like this, you get the, some semblance of the pain point is there, and that's that signal, that positive signal where you're like, but I have something, I have something. And it's like, for us, it was like, people are frustrated with their content marketing, with how agencies are doing it, with how they themselves in house employees have done it. Like we got something right. Fundamentally there. But the details mattered. Right. And it was a ton of details. Like, I don't want to attend a workshop. I don't want to even buy a course, but like I, as in the CMO types, don't want to buy a course, but turns out actually the practitioners did, but they wanted to do it not to help the company, but they wanted to do it to help themselves and their career. Like, it was like all these nuances. And then when we got into it, people, we did get clients just like writing stories, top of the funnel, not measuring. And then some clients were like, well, wait a minute. Can we like measure, are we getting any leads from it? And we were like, how do we do that? And then we turned to SEO and pain point. Like it was like all these iterations. And I guess what you're saying is like, if you can't iterate, like it's going to be hard for you to find your way and navigate your way to the thing that works. Okay. So this is convincing for like step one. Now let's assume the positive you do this for a month, 90 days, what have you, and you start to find some signs of life. You're like, Oh, this landing page or whatever is converting and this and that. Then if I'm the founder, I a hundred percent would start to get antsy and be like, Benji, you've been futzing around with this positioning for three months. Like I told, you know, whoever, whoever, well, I don't, I don't want to present. I'm a VC backed founder. Cause I don't like that, but like I, myself, like we're like waiting for you. We're like, we're like, so can you invest? It doesn't matter if you have VC funding or not. I think my take having been on both sides of the business, the VC funding helps accelerate. What's already working. And I think the mistake people make in VC funded businesses is they try to figure, they try to spend money to solve problems to force it to work. Yes. Before solving the problem, they think money is going to solve the problem. So, Oh, we need to figure out how to market. I'm just going to throw money at headcount. Oh, we need to figure out how to do sales. I'm going to throw money at headcount. In my experience, the proper way is to have a super lean team in the very beginning. One salesperson, one marketer and get those people to figure out how to sell and market on their own and do one thing very well, whether it's like outbound calling, outbound emails, prospecting into accounts, whatever way, same thing on the marketing side, figure out one channel, whether it's ads, whether it's content, whether it can also be cold email on the marketing side too. Figure out something that works and then use money to scale it. But the money doesn't really solve the problem. And I think that's the advantage that bootstrappers have is you don't have a ton of money. And so you're forced to solve the hard problems first. Otherwise you just run out of money. And then the VC funded companies where they fail typically is they don't have that same mindset about being frugal with money in the very beginning. Because you're trying to figure out these hard to solve problems and they're just throwing money at problems and they end up burning too much cash before actually solving the problems. Yeah, you're right. If we had somehow had money, which was kind of nonsensical cause it wasn't a VC funded business, but we could have forced fed customers into the course by just like buying enough ads, paying for it and you do it, you do it at a loss for long enough and then you're like slowly trying to figure out how to, how to make it profitable. That's like, The VC model is just like spend money. It's okay if it's really expensive at first, eventually cost will come down. And I think the bootstrapper mindset is flipped. It's like, let's solve the problems first and then use our organic growth to keep funding growth. So just slightly different mindsets. Okay. So say you figured out the positioning, um, One other question is like I'd be like Benji what channels are you gonna invest in now like let's scale this thing Well, I think before that I want to get back to like what is the profile of this marketer? Because I I think people make I think founders make the mistake that don't have a marketing background That I need to hire some specialist in the very beginning I need to hire a content marketer. I need to hire a paid ads person. I need to hire any of these things. To me, the right person is a marketing generalist, actually, who has a strength in one or two areas. So they have a broad enough foundation that they've, they've held different roles in marketing. And they have some of this experience of getting feedback from the customers doing messaging and positioning stuff, because I don't think there is a right Channel mix at the very beginning of a business. I think to me the marketer Plays to their strengths and figures out one channel And that one channel should be able to grow the business for a fairly long time before. Hold on. Hold on you're saying If you get the positioning right playing to the strengths, you mean? Different marketers in that same role could pick their own pet channel. For sure. Would pick different ways. Yeah. Because for example, with grow and convert, I had had the experience doing content marketing before and growing blogs. And so that's my natural skillset. I know how to do that. So coming into this, I'm going to lean on writing content and growing an audience as the main way that we're going to grow this business versus someone else could have. Someone else could just be good at LinkedIn posting. Like we, we know plenty of people that have successful agencies or consultancy practices who do nothing else other than LinkedIn posts that they're, they're one marketing channel or one skillset that they're really good at. There's nothing wrong with that. And to me, that's not my strength. I don't enjoy it. So I'm not going to play in that space, leave that channel for the people that excel in that. I'm going to focus on what I'm good at. And so, and I think another marketer could come in and say, I want to grow this business with paid ads. I know how to do this very well. So I don't think there is a right channel to grow any business. I think it goes back to the strengths of either the founder or that marketer in the role. So once they figure this out, then they basically need to, to pick one or two channels that they're going to test. Now this messaging to get it in front of the right people. So it can be written content. It can be ads. It can be LinkedIn posting, but basically now you need to put this message out there. Here's the value that this business adds. Here's the differentiation in the market. We talked about the disruption story. Basically that positioning that's in the disruption story. You need to get that out there in ads and content and whatever it is, and see if people are interested enough to come to your website and purchase. If not, You need to go back and figure out why and you need to ask those people why they're not buying. If they're coming in and they're having sales calls and not purchasing, what is it about your offer that they're not interested in? Fix that. Yeah. So it's just this constant process of testing, measuring. If something doesn't work, why isn't it working? How can I improve something? Testing it again until you find what works and Oftentimes people ask like, what's, what's the percentage, like, is there like a percentage of like calls that I should take that turn into customers? Is it like trials that turn into paid? It's like, I don't think there is a right number. I think you'll just get a feeling when things start to work and then explore that. Like keep, keep pushing in that channel until you find something that's working really well and is repeatable. Okay. I'm going to keep going here because I want to make it as tactical as possible. So we've concluded spend the first month getting the positioning right or first one to three months. Then, um, by the way, aside, the founding team should be looking for more of a marketing generalist. Now, now can we talk about like, how do you actually test this? What are some concrete options? Because I have opinions that I can do as a strong man. I think if I'm in that position. Having co run Grow and Convert with you for six, seven, whatever years, and seen tons of clients, seen their GA, known what channels they've done besides ours in content marketing, I would start with paid search first. Even if ultimately it doesn't work, here's why. Because search in general is a channel where you know the mindset and the desires of what that person is wants at that moment because they googled it. And that's when you're showing up. You're saying, I want to show my ad or whatever when somebody googles this. And the reason I was, I would start with paid search if I had a budget. Is it just speeds it up versus organic? Sure. Yeah. I would love to, to rank, but like that's going to take some time. And so in order to test it, I would say if you know this hypothetical company was selling accounting, I would be like, if we think we got the positioning right of our QuickBooks alternative small business accounting solution, then certainly we should be able to get, Some keywords around small business accounting around QuickBooks alternatives, the stuff that grow and convert ranks our clients for from an organic standpoint and paid by the way, we do paid search management is Like that's bound to work and if it's not going to work, it's not going to fail miserably. Like it, you know, work for anyone who does paid search, you know, that like, does it work quote unquote mean something numerical, which is like, what is the return on ad spend? Maybe the return on ad spend is, you know, 1. 01. So it's like basically break even, but it shouldn't be like. Zero. Uh, maybe not. There could be some spaces where like the click rate is like, Per cost per click is just so insanely high. Cause there's a bunch of VC funded companies that are just like blowing money and don't care about profitability there. Like we've heard about this a lot, but nonetheless, like I would probably start there slash maybe disruption story plus Twitter, where, where would you start? If I was like, okay, Benji, like, I think that's, we're getting frustrated. You spent 90 days on this. Here's 10, 000 a month. Like we need to see some leads. Where are you going to use it again? Again? I don't, I don't like the budget thing because, but that's, that's the reality. Yeah. No, I agree. I just don't, I don't think you need that much money in the very beginning because I think that the tests that you're running are, are many, many tests. So yes, actually I'll give concrete examples. I was the head of marketing and. ran marketing for this company called think apps. I was the fourth person. This was my job to come in and figure this stuff out. This is exactly the process that we did. Can you explain to everyone what think apps did? They're like a mobile development agency. There is, yeah, mobile development. They created apps for people on iOS and Android. So basically anyone that had an idea who wanted to build an app, they would do everything from taking your ideas, wire framing it, figuring out the right development design team, And basically give like delivering you a finished product that you could then go launch. Um, so yeah, like I came into this business, I talked to the existing customers. What were the prior ways that you tried to build things? What were the challenges that you had with working with these different development teams? And you learned all these stories that like horror stories of people working with all these different software developers and spending years on this without a finished product and like all these challenges of doing this. So. I took a lot of that messaging and put it on the homepage to try to absolve people of their fears and talk about the approach that we took different, uh, from the way that most people are doing app development. Then what you're saying is true. So that was like the first couple of months we redid our whole homepage and our whole website. And then that I have the same inkling that you did. I said, let's go test this. And so again, I'm not an ads person. But I've had enough experience to be able to manage it from a high level. So you did search first. We did. And so I hired a contractor who actually was just someone I had previously worked with, who I knew was good at ads. And then I simultaneously started on the content side. And so the ads were meant to then prove that the messaging and positioning that we could advertise against, like Apple iOS developer, uh, Android developer, some of these like. obscure keywords around developing certain types of apps, get people to our landing page, people would come in. And then what I did there is I would listen to the sales calls. And so again, at that point in time, there was the two founders, me as the marketer, and then one salesperson. And I thought it was important to listen to all the sales calls of the leads that I was generating to then understand the mindset of this person. What about our pitch was interesting? What wasn't? And then you're taking that feedback and iterating on the landing page, iterating on the website. You're just learning about what the customer wants. You can hone in the keywords you're targeting. You can hone in topics on blog posts. So we got enough, we had enough basically information from these calls and we are starting to close some of these deals from the paid ads. And then the founders were like, this is too expensive. Imagine going after like app developer, like you're paying like 50 something. But you said they're closing deals. So you were paying so much in ads. For those leads that the closed deals weren't covering it with enough margin for it to make sense. Not really because they're a small, they're starting with like test projects and then they were expanding into larger projects. And so just, I mean, you can imagine the clicks for those types of keywords. There was like 50 a click or something. Oh wow. And so it just like, was it was so expensive and do you remember roughly what kind of monthly spend there was? I think we were doing like 5, 000 a month or something like that. It started fairly small. But yeah, the founders were like, we just don't want to pay this much for a lead. What about doing content? And so that was, that was what I focused on next was like, let's take some of these same pain points and categories and write blog posts on it and built out a program doing that. And yeah, that ended up being very successful and the company ended up growing fairly quickly in that first year. From the combination of figuring out the right positioning and having one channel that kind of took off which ended up being content I mean, that's how the business fully grew. It was just they were getting Leads from content. What other channels should someone listening be thinking of because I I went to pay, my mind went to paid search. You are like there. We, we did events. So we would go to like local development meet or we'd go to like local product meetups that at this point we were in San Francisco. So there are tons of founders who are looking to build stuff, trying to figure out the best way to be build stuff. So the founders would go speak at talks. I would go to events and network with people. Um, what else did we do? We tried partnerships with different types of companies who would have founders that we would try to get in front of. Um, yeah, like newsletters, sponsorships. There's, I mean, there's tons of different channels, but again, I don't think the channel is that important. I think the channel is your means to get in front of people and you just need to figure out one channel that works. And to me, I think the mistake that a lot of companies make is they find that one channel and instead of just continuing to focus on that channel and grow that channel as much as they can until it, They're kind of capped out on growth there. They then try to go focus on another channel and another channel and another channel. It says marketing FOMO itch where you're like, well, we're not doing Pinterest. So I think most businesses, like even our own business, we've largely grown off of one channel, our entire business. We've been around for seven years now and we haven't really invested in anything else other than content and now ads to promote it. That's pretty much it. Like we haven't gotten pitched cold email. We've gotten pitched like creating an outbound sales team and all this stuff. Like it just doesn't make sense. Another thing on this topic that I think a lot of businesses get wrong. They try to switch from outbound to inbound or inbound to outbound. I think largely when a company begins, they have some DNA. They're either like an outbound org where they built their whole sales process around. prospecting into accounts, getting leads that are somewhat cold, warming them up through the sales approach and then closing them. And then there's full businesses who have some inbound program that the leads are very qualified where they don't need SDRs prospecting and qualifying leads on the front end. They can just have a sales team that closes those deals cause they're very warm. And I feel a lot of businesses either start with inbound And instead of just building out that inbound program that then they were like, Oh, inbounds working now we need to go do outbound. Well, the problem with doing that is it's a completely different sales approach. Your, your sales call to a lead that's warm, who already understands what you're doing is very different than prospecting and selling to a lead that is much colder or like way, Earlier in their buyer journey and the sales process and the messaging is different. And so I think as a business You need to really reflect on Which approach you want to take to selling? And build your team and your strengths around that. And, and eventually at some point you can build that other muscle. So if you become an inbound organization and you've grown very successfully like that, at some point in your business, when you've started to exhaust how many leads you can get from that, then go build that outbound program and then figure that out from scratch. You need to, again, go hire one or two people. They need to figure out how to sell and then again, you need to like test and iterate until you have a Process that works there and then you build out your team again I think the biggest mistake I see is people hiring way too many people too quickly before figuring out the hard problems Okay, let me summarize what we have so far So first marketing hire at a company that has some sales so there's some signs of good life number one You From the company's perspective, hire a marketing generalist, don't just hire a paid search person or something or paid ad expert or a content expert or a writer or whatever, and assume like this is a specialist, just grow that one channel for all the reasons you mentioned, because step two is first get the positioning right, right? If you're the first marketing hire, the number one thing is do not assume that the way the product is positioned. Now, here's the subtlety. We are talking about like the website and the homepage in that article, our positioning article, we distinguish and delineate between positioning and messaging. And it's a subtle one, but it's kind of important. Positioning is just the idea, the concept of what you are positioned against the messaging, how you want people to, to think about what you do. It's like, what is that? It's like for us, it's, we are a content marketing service or agency that use, that actually drives leads, not just hollow traffic. That's the position. It's what, what you want people to believe about you versus messaging is what, what you say to get people to believe that, right? Messaging is how that idea or concept. Manifests itself in a particular instance, aka the messaging on your homepage, the messaging on a particular ad, the messaging inside a blog post, right? So get the positioning right, tested via messaging, how to test. Number one, if you already have some traffic coming to the site, change it and see whether demo signups, whatever increase sales form fills. Number two, you can find some level of money to send some traffic there. Buy some Google ads, do whatever, right? We're talking about a couple thousand bucks. I don't know, maybe even a couple hundred, whatever. Um, then assuming you get that right, if not, you have to keep iterating and you may have bigger problems on your hands. Right. Maybe there's some fundamental product market fit issues that you have to report back. Those conversations are not going to be pleasant. Just like Benji had the founder be like, no, you're wrong. Like just, you know, look, the reality is if a company doesn't have their positioning dialed in and someone who was just hired tells them that that's not supposed to be a pleasant conversation. Like there is going to be resistance to it because that's just unpleasant news to hear. Nobody wants to hear that anyway. Then assume you get that right. Step three, right? Step one was hire the right person. The step two was tests and get the positioning right. Step three is now test with that new positioning. Start to sort of like one test, different channels. Yeah. One channel at a time or it can be small tests on multiple channels. It doesn't really matter, but the goal is just to find something that works. So find something that's bringing in leads where the leads are, Interested enough in the business to take the next step. So that's step. What are we three one hire the right person to Get the positioning right three test different channels assuming that's right Then finally on step four You're saying then start putting some effort resources money into that channel and start to scale that then then the budget becomes important because I think the reason why I didn't want to get to the budgetary stuff before is because I you can spend way too much money on the wrong things. And I don't think often it takes a lot of money to test these things out. I think in, in that first 90 day period or even six month period while you're figuring out the messaging and testing these channels, there's not a lot of money that you need to spend. It's, it's literally strict strategy work. It's talking to customers, it's time, it's figuring out all these nuances of the business. It's and then to test things. Yeah, you need to spend some money. But again, the budget should be very minimal there. You should be operating super lean, hiring contractors to help you. You don't need to hire full time people at this point just to figure out what works after you figure out something that works. So again, when we had Google ads coming in or, uh, when we had Google ads and we had leads coming in, or when I started to produce content that was driving leads, then it's like, okay, how can we go hire more writers? Or how can we hire a paid search contractor to keep doing this? And then what's the proper budget that we should put behind this? And I don't think there is a right answer on proper budget. It's like. I think it's an incremental growth thing. Like if someone was operating off 5, 000, like double it and see if you can kind of maintain that same growth or profitability on that channel. And that's how people should think about it. It should be like the slow growth thing that you're, you're constantly iterating, you're figuring it out and then you're putting a little bit of fuel behind the fire and seeing if you can keep things constant while you're, you're putting more resources or money behind it. And then. you're, then you're just trying to scale that one channel as much as possible. So yeah, I think that that is the approach that I would take. I don't think it needs to be much more complicated than that. I don't think at that point after figuring it out, you need to then go test multiple channels. I think then the goal is double down on what's working and scale it as much as possible. And it's only until you tap out on that, that channel. Like you've done everything that you possibly can and leads are slowing or you have some growth mandate where you know that channel is not going to be able to scale beyond a certain limit that you then go back to that same approach. Step three, testing another channel to find something that works and then running through that same process of figuring out. What that channel is, the right approach, and then staffing it properly or putting the right budget behind it. And it should just be this one channel at a time, and you should keep adding like that. And then same thing with hiring more people. I don't think that you should hire a bigger team until you've figured out how to do that thing by yourself. And if you don't know how to do it, go hire a contractor to figure it out with you. Before hiring someone full time. Like I think this idea of you need to go find someone who has a background in email marketing to hire a full time, come on board, like just cause that person has experience in the same industry or came from a different company. It doesn't mean that they're going to be able to make the channel be successful at your business. And when you're figuring it out from scratch, I think from a time and resource perspective, it's better off. Running super lean until you solve this problem and then and then putting resources behind it. Yeah, that was the next thing I was gonna ask about so I'm glad you went there is we see that in our clients all the time where they're like And and we get the benefit of that So like we have clients being like we you know, we tried this thing or outbound is tapping out It's not really marketing, it's sales, but whatever, right? It's like, it's, it's our channel. It's a customer acquisition channel. You know, outbound is tapping out. We need to do content. Like the founder used to write these posts and it kind of worked. So we have evidence from a few years ago at work, but I'm not a content person. I'm not an SEO person. I don't know the first thing about it. So I, you know, I heard about you guys or a friend mentioned. And so like we get the benefit of that. But I was going to ask that, like, say they are on step three or four or something where they're like testing channels or whatever, and they're like, look, I'm not paid search makes sense for us, like just from kind of a logic perspective, maybe it's something people search for a lot. I'm not, I don't know. At first thing about Google ads, I've never set it up. Should I hire a Google ads agency? Like our clients say that all the time. They're like, hang on, I'm hiring this content person to manage you guys. Plus do some other content, which I always think is kind of funny. Like, why are you even spending money on that? But like, they do that all the time. What you're, and you're saying, hire a contractor. If you, if you want to test, if you think that the what dynamics of your business make Google ads, like a great first channel to test, that's great. You don't know. Take our course first and try some things on your own before hiring us. I think because like, well, I mean, or you could put your faith in us in the very beginning. It's just people have different levels of comfort with hiring and like spend. But I think like test it out for yourself and see if it can work. And then you need manpower behind it or you need someone that already knows a better approach than you. And then, um, Go higher. But I think it's tough. Like imagine a founder who has no content background, who has just, who's never tried it before. I think they're just going to be way more skeptical in the beginning if they haven't tried it themselves, hiring us from the very beginning because they don't have the confidence that we have, that our approach is going to work. I think if they have tried it and they've created a few pieces of content, they're like, Oh, there's something here with this channel, but I don't have the I don't know how to hire for this. Well, like I don't know how to hire a writer. I don't know how to hire a content marketer I don't know how to build a whole team around it And, and then you start to go look, look for agencies that can solve that problem. I think that's the better approach. Here's my perspective. I think in short, if you just straight up try to hire either an expensive agency, and I know this is not a self serving comment, this is like anti selling growing convert, but that's not what this show is about. It's not about us selling ourselves. It's like, um, we're trying to be honest. The chances of mishiring and wasting a ton of money. On an expensive agency or a full time employee, which sometimes can be worse because then it's like, it is worse. I will, I will say that, like, I feel bad because I think. The mistake that a lot of companies make is that they hire a full time person without having figured out how to solve a problem first, thinking that this person's going to come in and solve it. You can be six months, a year, two years into this relationship and things are not working. But because they're a full time employee. As the founder or the manager, you feel bad for making the wrong decision and you let that decision fester for too long and it can ruin your business. And I think the advantage of hiring a contractor, an agency versus a full time person in the very beginning is I feel like from a founder's perspective, it's much easier to cut that person or agency When you've made a bad decision than it is to hire a full time person and for whatever it is, culturally, we've been taught to hire the full time person first and think about filling a role or solving a problem with a full time person. And I've just seen seeing it being way more detrimental to a business taking that approach. This is actually really important from an execution standpoint. And I believe in this strongly. I'm a hundred percent with Benji on this. Like when you are testing channels and ideas. Companies spend way too much money testing them in some like elaborate way. Like you said, full time hire, director level, executive level person, and then they're gonna need, they have a massive salary because they're gonna need a budget to hire the team, plus Pet agency that they love for the reviews three times. They got to bring it in and it's just gonna cost you a ton and you're gonna be a year into it and be like, where, where are the customers? The chances are high. I would opt 100 percent for gorilla marketing and there's a few reasons. Number one is straight cost savings. Like, for example, we've talked about and we'll talk about more like, well, let's just use our Google ads example. Say like, you know, you're in our scenario and like Google just search, just like make sense. It's like something people search for a lot and you want to do it. And I'm in that situation. I have never once set up a Google ads campaign. I'm on the calls with you and amethyst. I see the back end of it. Like I know the strategy of it. I don't know the mechanics of it. Like I'm too old to figure that out now. I'm not going to learn that, you know? But like, I think if I had to do that on my own, I'm going to like an upwork type place. And finding someone you can get someone that is like smart and then here's a couple like details because you and I have tried this. We found like HubSpot experts and other things. We've hired a bunch of people off of there. Um, I would also be ready and prepared to hire multiple people. Because just like Google ads is like a complicated topic and you hire one Google ads expert, they do it one way and it doesn't work and every, everybody would be like, it's just, we tried Google ads. It doesn't work. You guys, we tried it. It doesn't work. It's just like people who tell us that we tried content. It doesn't work. You're like, yeah, cause you didn't do it properly. And so then try the next person. And the next person, like two or three, that's enough. If you try two or three completely different Google ads people, and you think you have a reasonable strategy, you think your positioning is dialed And you cannot get any campaigns to give you a row as it's acceptable. It probably is not going to work or like there's some big problem, you know, and you spent what couple thousand bucks right on ad spend plus like those people. And you've gotten a few different opinions. And you're not wondering like you said, when you hire an employee, clients tell us this on the back end. You hire an employee. You're not having that thought. Is there something wrong with the employee? Maybe they're not smart enough. Maybe their strategy was not right. That's a nagging thought. You don't have that. You're like, well, I talked to three of them. They're completely different, right? Upwork is great like that. You're like, one is from England. The other is from Nebraska and the other one's in New York. Like they don't even talk to each other. How could all three of them have concluded the same thing? It's probably right. And then you move on to the next thing. And I think that kind of like, I'm calling it guerrilla marketing is probably like not right. But just like. Kind of very resourceful, you know, budget strapped, like just like, and then, and then that also teaches you because it forces you to get into the nitty gritty. Cause you're asking that person like, hold on, hold on. Why is this not working? How did you set up this campaign? And then you're comparing how person a did it with person B did it. And like, you now know enough to where if it's working. You can sniff out the BS agency. You can sniff out is this employee that I want to hire to scale this thing smart or do they know what they're talking about? Because you have a basis of knowledge because you like got your hands a little bit dirty with this. The contractors to get it done. Um, yeah, that's a good step four or five or whatever step we're on. We can pay attention afterwards. Yeah, I like this. This would be a good plan. Let's summarize hire the right person, a generalist at first, that person needs to spend the first one to three months or whatever amount of time getting the positioning right by testing different channels, by talking to a bunch of customers, figuring out what their pain points are, figuring out what, um, they're using the product to solve and what the biggest benefits Get that messaging right on whatever pages. Then start to micro test little channels and start to add. And you said like double the budget, double the budget, increase the budget and see like, can I get this to hold? Can I get the conversion rates to hold is like leads actually scaling. Look for big swings. Do not waste your time. AB testing right now. 10%, 20 percent lift. None of that nonsense, right? It's like, this is absolutely working. Then like, if you need to execute those channels higher, like. Little expert contractor consultant type experts where you can, where you're not like committing heavily. And only when you have all of that dialed in positioning is right. Like you have some evidence from a channel that it's working. You've scaled it a little bit yourself, then double down on it through whatever means. I think you summed it up perfectly. If you like this video, don't forget to subscribe. You can also get the audio only versions of these shows wherever you get your podcasts. And you can follow us at growandconvert. com slash newsletter for any articles and updates for when these videos come out.