Hello and welcome to the C-suite Business Show, where we talk about some of the most exciting developments in new business generation from our own consulting experience to the latest strategies and technologies available to you, the C-suite business community. And I'm your host module. Make Well, welcome to the podcast. And this is a new series that we're starting, which is, as you can see from the name is the C-suite Business Show. Joining me is Liz. Hello. And we are going to have a chat and talk about the changes that we've been making within the business and how it mirrors. It should mirror what other businesses are doing as well. Now, the point of this is that back in 20, 18, we started on a new, a new direction that was based upon producing content. Doesn't sound very unusual, but when you look at the changes that are happening more recently in businesses you can you can understand why our version of content appears to be vastly different to the content that other people are producing. I'll come on to that in a minute. But the point of this is that we are we've, we've realigned ourselves. We were, we were putting out our information and content to people in general and realized that it's not for everybody. And the way that I view and talk about business, I think I would probably upset most employees anyway. Because at the end of the day, most people are employees. There's only a handful of people on the C-suite and therefore the bulk of the people out there are employees. That's a fact. So what's this point? What's the what's the point? What's the point of it then? You serious? Well, it's it's about the generation of new business, and it's something that will be close to every single company's heart. But there's a problem. There's a massive problem. And that is the two people that are supposed to be driving this they the marketing people are failing. And there's no there's no simple way for easy way of easing anyone into this. They are failing. They've been failing for quite a long time. And the information that we see and read backs up, I mean, completely. Yeah. I mean, we've spent probably well, while we've been in lockdown, we've had a lot of opportunity to read stuff and talk about stuff. And we do spend a lot of time like our mornings are spent having those coffee chats. And this is really probably what this has come out of these coffee conversations in the morning where we've been talking about business and where businesses go in. The things that we've read, the things that we've observed out there in the marketplace. Yeah. And. And I think what we've we've realized is that there is, on the one hand, you've got some big organizations like Forrester and Gartner and McKinsey and people like that, you know, organizations like that, that are highly respected, particularly in the technology and in the technology arena. Their opinions are highly valued. And they've been talking about how prospects and customers want to self educate and then the downside of the self-education for the prospects point of view is that there is a dearth of information available. There is that there is so little information and content out there for the prospect to educate themselves that they and they have to resort to speaking to a salesperson. And that's not necessarily what a prospect wants to do. And I think in the last two years, while we've been in a lockdown situation where you can't speak to people in the office and so on, prospects have had a lot more time to be able to evaluate the products that they want to buy. And I think a lot of it shows that there is actually there is so little content out there and it actually is in contradict shown to what Gartner and McKinsey and Forrester are saying that, you know, prospects do want to self educate. They do want to go in on that journey themselves before they even engage a company. Yeah. I mean, Gartner put out that it was like 83% of prospects want to evaluate what they're planning to buy by themselves before they even speak to a salesperson. Do you think, okay, well, how are they doing that? Well, through effort because they have to pick up tidbits from, from different websites to learn about what what is going on because the common what's the word, the common ideology is, well, we've got salespeople for that. You know, if you want to learn about our product, that's what we've got a salesperson for. Yeah. And you go, Yeah, but that was in the fifties, in the sixties, in the seventies. Here we are. 20, 22 and we've got a situation you've got a situation now that the lockdown was like a catalyst and it helped people realize, wait a second, I can find out about this stuff that I want. I can read, listen and watch whatever I want without interruption, without someone breathing down my neck saying, Why are you looking at that video? And when no one's going to challenge them. And so you've got, you've got businesses that are stuck in this this dated mentality that says if you want to learn about our product, you can call us or send a salesman in and businesses are failing because of that. Plus, if we go back to what the salespeople did, they they called. Yeah, we talked about it before anybody that listened to the previous podcasts or read anything on our website. One of the the primary things that we advocate against is marketing automation you go, oh, how can you say that? Surely you don't know what you're talking about. I'll be doing this 35 years. I know exactly what I'm talking about. People have, have blindly gone down this path of buying molecules Mason software because the company's been advised to do it so here you've got a CEO who hates his job. My opinion, his job. Your job is to corral the right people is to get the right people around you. And you know, whether you're Jack Welch or or any put anyone else out there, the the really well known leaders, business leaders. The emphasis is on the leading and a leader could only lead if he's been given the right data and information. So the people that are giving them the data and information as a marketing people and the sales marketing people say, oh, you need to get a marketing automation because what it will do, you know, you can we do a paper click we we do a landing page and they'll give us their details and then we can hand it over as marketing qualified lead to sales and sales. Go Chase, thanks very much. And we'll go and ring them up and say, hey, you want to buy one or look at a product and this doesn't work. B2B, I'm talking about not talking about B2C. B2B doesn't work because the customer doesn't want to keep the details, right? Nobody does. Everybody knows it. I mean, absolutely. Everybody knows nobody wants to give out their details. Nobody wants to be called Cordis, a 400 to one shot to find someone that wants to buy something. Yet this is being rammed down the throats of the CEOs because everybody in marketing says, and we've got to have it. There's no other method, is there? Nobody's come up with a with a better idea. And you think, well, yeah, it sounds like I'm bitching about something, but I'm not. So in the past two weeks, I've read Gartner saying traditional says a marketing doesn't work, needs to be reevaluated. It just doesn't. Nobody's quite sure what it should look like but doesn't work. I read yesterday on Forbes magazine that actually the tenure with one person was nine months for CMO. I've been going off and banging on about this, and it's 18 months because I've read it on the Internet is I somehow website. I can't, I can't write it off because I'm not looking at my screen. But there were four or five articles I've read that said 18 months to Seth Godin last year that it was 18 months. Yeah. And now someone said it was nine months. So this is the tenure of a CMO and it's like, Well, why would you second a CMO? It's because they're not performing. They pitch up, they go on, it's on a set, your world align and they go, Well, okay, they take them on, employ them. Three months into the job, they're, they're setting up their new strategy to 12 months to execute it. They fail three months to find a new job, and that's happening again and again. It is getting shorter and shorter. The average is eight months. Yeah. Then naturally there are some that are shorter, some are going to be longer. Yeah. But at the end of the day, there is a problem out there and nobody knows how to address. The one I read yesterday was I was saying, well actually and the CEO's listening to this book and I love this one actually it's your fault because you don't know how to work out how to recruit them. You don't have to take them on how to employ CMO. You don't know how to give them a proper brief, you don't know, yada, yada is like, Wait a second, a CEO you either developed the product, started a business, or you've been employed by a product company or whatever to run it. The CMO was in place. When are they going to take some responsibility for this? I mean. That's what this is all about, accountability. I mean, you know, a CEO won't know the ins and outs of the finances. He wants to know the high level stuff. He doesn't want to know the data. It doesn't need to know that's not the CFO. CFO, yeah. I'm the chief information officer, if you've got one knows all about how the software works, how it all fits together, you know, and he'll deliver high level stuff to the to the CEO. But why should the CEO know everything about marketing? Because he probably is he doesn't know everything about finance unless it's an accountant. He doesn't know everything about software unless he was a software developer. Yeah. You know, it might have been sales that that's fairly high probability. That was probably a while ago anyway. But nevertheless but I do think, you know, there's no accountability it's you know, you talked about marketing automation before and I think maybe what sea CEOs don't know and maybe see and those don't know this either, which would be a frightening thought. But you get you get a piece of content and it's invisible to Google. You can't be found you're hiding your content. So whilst just being told on the one hand, marketing automation is the way forward because we can gather people's email addresses and that's what we need. We want to be able to contact people. So we want to get that information. But on the other hand, Google can't see who you are and can't see what you've got out there. Yeah. So Google can't even evaluate whether that piece of content that you've got on your website is worth reading because that's what Google do. We've got some content on our website that was on page one of Google within two or 3 hours because Google looked at it, evaluated and said, Yeah, this is a great piece of content because it follows these rules. I can see it, you know it, and it's got its numbering and, and all the components of a good piece of content. Yeah. You know, it's the right lenses that it's read. It's and the readability is, is good, but if you hide your content behind a form, Google doesn't know whether it's a decent piece of content or not. So you don't even have it if you like an impartial view if you're content because the person that's written it might say, well, it's a quote piece, you know, my blog was great or my white paper was great. I mean, I've read I've downloaded a piece that I was interested in some. So I think it was an accountancy package. And I thought, oh, that looks kind of interesting. I downloaded it and I had to give up my email address and my telephone number. And when that downloaded it, I realized it was a word document. First of all, let me put it on the Internet, but also it was two pages it had no pictures and it was just two pages double line spacing on. And it was like, I can't believe I have offered up my email address to get this worthless piece of content. And there are a lot of people out there that do this. I mean, statistically, I looked another thing. It was about in the technology industry where technicians, people, people that were like software developers and they wanted a piece of information, but they, they, they had to give their email address. So they put their email address in, they downloaded the content, the content was useless. They unsubscribe to meet it. Like now the thing is, what you probably don't appreciate from a CEO's perspective, you might go, Yeah, we've got loads of people have downloaded, but you don't appreciate is the number of people that will unsubscribe from you because your content is actually very poor and not what they're looking for. And they've had to surrender personal details, but they will unsubscribe and they'll probably never come back to you again. This is it. I mean, the whole thing about content, people have been going on about content for a long time. But the trouble is excuse me, trouble is, is that the people in marketing don't know what good content looks like. That's the fundamental problem. And the what adds to the problem is that marketing people I mean, my view is that people kind of gravitate towards marketing, not out of a strategic career. Path, they fall into it. Most people fall into marketing. Yeah. And I'll define this on on going back some years you had an art department. It's the art department had the creatives in. It didn't matter whether it was film or graphic design or copy or writing money they were the people that were to create the genuine creatives. Now we've got this then. Now we've got this middle ground which is called marketing, and these are techies techie wannabes because they're manipulating and looking to attempt to construct the martech and tech stacks to make those work. And then at the other end you've got salespeople. So now your new business, you know, going back some years, you had the, the creatives then you had marketing, then you had sales. The creatives don't exist anymore in B2B, in B2B. So now it's all merged into one is called marketing so you you don't get a large graphic design team and most companies don't get large graphics team, a large filming too. It doesn't happen. And so the people that are driving marketing are admin and so their role is that when they don't know or really care about selling, why should they? You got salespeople for that. Yeah. So their role is to provide these marketing qualified leads and people have gone on for the past probably 78, nine, ten years about the friction between sales and marketing. And it's one of the things I've written about is that both of them want to maintain the status quo. Go, Well, why would you say that? Surely they want business to come in. Oh, they do. They do a business to come in, but not at their expense. And that's where we come in. I mean, this is this is why, as a C-suite C-suite business show, because what we're saying is that you can do away with most of them. And people will be listening to this going really well. What are you saying? If you if a business understands what the customer actually wants, it changes everything. Massively, massively changes everything. You think, okay, let's let's just quickly, I'm not going to go through all of it because it's all on our website and there are videos and podcasts and downloads and even live streams about this. But the the point is that the customer wants to be educated. The prospect wants to be educated. So they do that. They're searching the Internet to find information where they can self educate. If they find it, they like it and they like it, they'll they'll start to connect with you. But the problem is that to connect with those people outbound, it takes something like seven to ten touches for them to recognize your brand once a record. But in order for them to recognize it, they've got to see your information but sending information out one in three get through, which means you've got to send up things. They've got to be able to visualize and see things so in order to do that, that's going to take six or seven months to send out or to enable somebody to visualize 30 odd things that you've got most businesses throw the towel in after three or four. So so that's that's the first fundamental problem. And secondly to look at the content, they want to be educated. If they get educated, they'll come back. They know who you are, they know what you do. But if you're not prepared to show them how to use your product or how to how your product is going to benefit them without chucking a salesman in front of them, they'll walk away. Why should they and that's and that's the fundamental problem. So the only the only path to rectifying this is to produce everything that's necessary and just allow people to see it. Yeah. And people and people go, oh, oh, can't do that. But here's the, here's the kicker. If you produce the content, make it freely available videos, download podcast, livestream and so on. So allow people to come see you and I come on to get access in a total addressable market in a minute. But if you make everything available, you become attractive. Yeah. And if you don't do it, you ain't attractive. I think I'll find you. Yeah. I think that there is a statistic that we can across that millennials will go through the whole process from start to finish more readily, buy something worth something like a. 100 grand plus, a. Hundred grand plus and do all self-serve. That's pretty that's really quite startling that the millennials will do that is because they've they've grown up through that and more and more of those you know, those millennials are now becoming buyers and influencers in businesses. Yeah, I jotted something down other day actually, when we were having coffee and you know prospects want to self-serve and self educate themselves and the companies employ salespeople because you want them to sell the product. Yeah. And and so you, you don't produce the content because your objective is always to sell, not to serve. Yeah. And so by having a mindset of selling and not serving, it means that your customers or your, your potential customers don't have access to you in a way that they want to have access to you. Because you're, and you're focusing on the sale of the product, not serving the prospect of serving the customer. And if that comes across loud and clear that you don't care about them because you're not producing the content that they need, then why should they place their business with you? Because you're not showing that you care about them. I didn't say I did. I wrote something about the day that was about BPM and customer experience. So BPM, business process management and the software that you can get from European and Versace and service now. So with these different companies, the focus is on widgets, I call them, which is, you know, getting something to happen, getting a process to happen that is functional, whether it's robotics, whether it's manufacturing, and so on. So everybody wants the kudos of God made it happen and we save some money on it. But the part, the part that gets forgotten about, I think is sales and marketing transformation, not digital transformation with BPM, but sales and marketing transformation because that's the customer experience, but the customer experience starts at the prospect point of their experience as a customer starts when they are prospects. Yeah. And if the experience that they encounter is one of there ain't no content, they're forced to fill out a form, they're pestered by salespeople. You shoot yourself in the foot straight away before you even get into first base. Yeah. And then even if, if they, if they do manage to sell to you, they're there previous prior experience is not good enough for them to remain loyal. Yeah. Someone else comes along and says, We've got this shiny thing here. Oh, this is how we look after you go, Oh, do you know what? I'll go with you because you look after you look after your customers. Yeah. So you're instantly losing them to the customer. Experience process needs to start at that point, which is serving the customer. Yeah. So if you can demonstrate that you are intent on educating them, you're intent on helping them. Yeah. There was this whole networking thing about about serving people and helping them first before you have know all this kind of stuff. And it rings true to an extent, but, but looking at what businesses are doing, I believe and this is the whole point of this C-suite show, the C-suite are being misled by people on the phone, at the grassroots, at the ground level. They're being misled by them because if if you if one were to adopt our strategies, all of which have redeployed an excess of what online because we had we don't want your email address because you can find out everything and you would restructure everything, make everything available completely self-serve, allow the prospects of self-serve. And if they want to buy from you allow them to do it online. Or get the salesperson involved at the last mile for the last mile. Because then if they if they if they want to chat, if they want to talk to someone, put someone who absolutely knows exactly what they're talking about. If someone rings up and make it easy for them to ring up, make them easy to get onto chat, make it easy to get responded to quickly and and let's see businesses again and again and again time and time again. Just missing a trick here. If we were saying, oh, and thanks for listening to this this podcast and here's, here's, here's our new software which is bought out, you go on. I've got your number. There is no software. No. There is no cost. And if you if you if you follow this through to the cost of what we're saying, I'm bearing in mind I'm saying this based upon 35 years in business. So I'm not saying, oh, let's go on this act as advocate for marketing or advocate for sales. No, absolutely not. The point is, is advocate for, for the C-suite. Yeah. Because I have seen people get mocked basically that they have been rolled over because of the little sensitivities of people that want the football tables and, and basketball hoops and free beer on a Friday given it the big one about marketing. And this is what you you're on that point. Yes. So I'm watching this this YouTube thing this morning. And of course, I want to keep abreast of stuff. And it's about it's something like B2B how to get B2B marketing, B2B leads first for B2B SaaS products. And it's like like two and a half thousand or 3000 people watch it. And I'm thinking, well, okay, so I started it. Then I put it on one and a half times playback. So I'm not listening to all the nonsense and I'm skipping ahead and it's just post up message on LinkedIn once a week, once a week on LinkedIn, then do some webinars and then send them a letter by FedEx, send Melissa. 90% chance of it being opened. It's like, Yeah, you would open a FedEx letter and then build it straight away in disgust. But this is what people are putting out right now. It's just like this morning and these people have not got a clue. I mean, we talked about this before and one morning we were talking about how how things have changed since March 20, 20 and everybody you know, you've got to admit that, you know, March 20, 20 was so unexpected came right out of left field lock down people not working in the office and so on and so and it was a complete shock to the system. Yeah. And everybody was in the same boat. It wasn't like it was for some people and not everybody was in the same boat and a lot of businesses sadly didn't survive. Yeah. And there were some businesses that really gained out of it. You know, they were able. To go like Amazon. Pivot. Yeah. And Zoom and, but they were able to pivot and did really really well out of it, which is, you know, there are always going to be winners and losers. But what we talked about was how, you know, the strategy that you would have had for your marketing pre March 2020 is not the strategy that's going to take you from March 22 and beyond. It has to be it has to be different because now people whether we like it or not on whether you I mean a lot of people listening to this will say yeah we've with either we we're all completely homeworking or people want hybrid if we don't offer hybrid working we can't employ people this is a reality because people want to work from home. But the point is that people working from home is that they're not contactable in the office like they used to be. So that whole strategy if even if you know somebody fills a form in and I know this from experience, they fill a form in on the website and even probably more so now they put the office number on that fall and if they put the office number up on that form, they don't want you calling them because they know they are not in the office. And so you can't reach them. You might reach them by email, but they can easily postulate they're not bothered about that because they don't want to be touched with phone calls. And I think if you but also what I think has come out of this lockdown experience is that because people are working at home, people now have access, accessibility or access to more media. You know, they can watch video, they can listen to a podcast, they can read an article, whereas if they were sitting in the office, they wouldn't put a podcast on. You know, they wouldn't be watching a video because somebody would be like over there. You're watching cat videos. Yeah. Well, that's why we've got this whole thing about Livestream. Yeah, but here's the money shot. Yeah. This really is the money shot. You have everybody has a total addressable market. If you don't know what it is, you shouldn't be in business. So you have a total addressable market. You have different sizes of businesses. Within the UK, there are just under 6 million up to ten employees 212 up to 50, 36,000, up to two 50 and above is 8000 something. So if those sizes of businesses you've got a total addressable market and so and you already know how many there are because you can get a database to identify it. So it's really easy. So every company in the world wants to be able to reach their total addressable market and they come because they don't know how to best celebrate nobody because nobody in sales knows how to do it because they don't know the technologies and what's available attainable and nobody marketing knows because nobody their job, they got to pay particular in there to reach out but that's it. So basically that both sides fail and the people that suffer the most people are the top people in the C-suite. Your job you failed, you're fired. So here is his his hair is the most important methodology to reach your total addressable market by the database and email them and get them to watch your livestream I mean, I'm not I'm not advocating just pick up your iPhone and go live, but not far from it. And so if you email your total addressable market once a week and say, join us anonymously on our live stream. And with this week, we're going to be talking about X if only 1%. And we and everybody in sales knows this only about 1% of your total addressable market are looking to buy your product this week by change next week. But on average, circa 1% of your total addressable market are actually in the market for your type of product, whatever it is. Yeah. So therefore, if there's 50,000 or, you know, ten, 10,000, whatever, how many thousands you want, maybe had 1,001%. Ten people. Yeah. So imagine if your total addressable market is there's a thousand people and you email them all and a handful of people watch you the work that's gone into that the one person can do would be able to reach more than your entire telesales operation. Yeah. Period. Absolute fact because trying to reach someone by telephone, it's a 400 to one shot and that's, I mean at the end of the day, I mean we're going to say all day long talk about statistics. We can, you know, at the businesses that start up 30% fail in the first year, 50% second year, 70% by the third year and a 91% by the 10th year. So 90 plus 91% of all businesses fail within ten years. Right. Okay that's from the FTC. Half a million businesses start every year and half a million businesses fail every year. And some people go and we've been going longer than that that we've work with. Great. You go, Okay, what about if you've got a finance as an investment? It's a 40% of all businesses that get investment fail so that they don't give a timescale on that. So that means any of them, anyone that's got investment can fail at any time. 70% of those businesses that receive investment don't achieve the targets that they set for themselves. And something like 90 odd percent of businesses that receive investment don't make any money or create an ROI for the investors and the list goes on and on and on and on. And some people can say, Well, it's just churn, and it's like, you can't be mad. You can't be mad to go into business. I mean, our way of recommending marketing and if we if we were being precious about it, we wouldn't be doing this no. I wouldn't have just said, you got to go. You've got to start livestreaming it. And and get anybody to do the figures. It's on our website and get the figures. It costs pennies absolute. You can stream for free on Facebook, LinkedIn, and there's one other YouTube. YouTube. On you that so you can stream for free. So think about the logic of this. If emailed, 10,000 people and I know this, I looked at this the other day just look at the cheapest so say forget marketing automation bin it you could completely pin your automation costs you're what your SAT costs for marketing automation using something like MailChimp cheap cheap you can send out 10,000 emails 12 times a month founder quit not that you would because he'd only do it once a week so 10,000 emails once a week founder quit to say come and watch our free anonymous live show ask us any questions we'll answer them anonymously online live in front of our audience or you can chat with us privately. It's up to you. You cannot beat that. No, nobody can touch it. No. And then the second part of it is if you do have a lot of people following you on on social whatever is a chemical company, the other day we got 50,000 people following them, following their company night on on LinkedIn. But they don't do anything with it. They do nothing. So what do you say, you say you're 50,000, even 5000 people following you you can put adverts out that you create in-house. So you're not these, these are not pay per click adverts. They suggest adverts. So you create a meme or graphic or whatever and post it every day and we recommend you do four adverts every day and post them every day for a month. So create 120 adverts in total, post them automatically every day, use a platform like Smarter Queue. So it does it automatically for you post them every day. So and the adverts promote your content not to forget the product, the products in there, your call to actions in there. Tell them to go and buy it. They know what they're looking for. As they say, we've got this content, that content, this podcast, that video, that stream this download and you advertise that and then if you still haven't got enough people in terms of your that your your viewers, you could then take that database that you've got of your 10,000 in your total addressable market and upload that to LinkedIn and set up a pay per click campaign. So it puts your banner advert in front of those email addresses that you're already emailing anyway. So that the whole thing about this humungous cost for pay per click via Google for B2B, this is nonsense. It doesn't. Work, but also it doesn't work because it's all that content is hidden. So you're, you're producing if you do not pay per click campaign. But Google doesn't know whether what you're sending to is good, bad or indifferent. I just, I mean. I know. Actually insanity. Yes. Because then you expose costs easily and quickly ramp up. But I think if you broke it down, I said, what? What was the you know, how much business did we actually get from Google. For Forest to say it a while ago now, a few years ago, less than 1% of people that will click and click through and go through that process that so-called funnel process actually become revenue paying customers less than 1%. So first to say less than 1%. McKinsey, you've got another comment Gartner. We've got another load of statistics is all to me, it's a bit like a caveat is definitely caveat emptor, buyer beware. But in this case, it's business. Business beware because all the information is out there but that you're choosing either choosing not to read it or people know about it, but they can say anything I like. Here's a classic. To me, this is an absolute classic. You know, you can't knock HubSpot, really. I mean, I think all these names, Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, Fairplay templates that have done a great job, sometimes a software so why they getting involved in podcasts I mean, I'm the only cynical one guy. You've got to be kidding me. Yes. You know, you've got this company that automation, automation, automation, automation, big time, big, big time and course less. Lest we forget to pay for this silly kickback, not just directly from HubSpot, but that. So, so you've got this company that get to agree to buy marketing automation from some marketing company somewhere other, the marketing company getting commission on a monthly basis for that subscription. Yeah, same. Same for Marketo signed Pardot, I think I'm saying vertical, all of them. So you think you're being given or recommended an impartial bit of advice yet? Why are HubSpot going down a path of investing in podcasts now, bearing in mind Spotify dumped half a billion dollars into podcasting? The novel anchor, you've got all these different players. Podcast, podcast, podcast. Of course we're doing it, but we were doing it last year and the year before. But the end of the day, why would a marketing automation platform invest in podcasts? Because it's the content. Yeah. But they're not saying promote content. They're not saying advertise the content because what do you what do you need marketing automation platform for? Because at the end of the day, what you've got to do your they rather are trying to get you to keep hiding your content and keep paying Piper click and let's be cynical again. So big tech martech play together and get you to do your marketing and you maintain your income per person per annum circa 100 grand per person from. It sounds like a bit of a scam to. Me. So if you look at that, if you look at the figures, you go to the British Institute of Statistics and it says if you've got about ten people in your companies for 80 grand, if you've got one, if you've got 50 people, 50 plus people in your company, you're looking about 160 grand, give or take. So that's between less than a million and up to five, and it's above 5 million you're going to do there or thereabouts. You might do a bit more Google do 1.5 million per person per annum. Got, I has to think how much the figure is now for Apple, but the 3 trillion that they're valued at is different to how much the turnover is per person, per annum. Nevertheless, if you're being told to pay per click to tell someone to click on an ad for a banner advert to a landing page to then fill out a form to get some details that then becomes allayed. The friction you've got is ridiculous. So first friction, first level of friction. If you've got enough money yeah. Yeah. To be to, to actually get your advert on the front page. So that's the first element of friction. Second element of friction. Well, should copywriting skills like any good to actually get that person to click on your banner and did you split test it or ABC split test it with three alternatives as an ex frictions. Third element of friction landing pages. Any good who wrote it was on it? Did you follow all the prerequisite itself above the fold and bullets and and logos and have you got a video on it and so on. So and then how much information you ask before we all know that? Yeah, just asking just for an email is difficult enough but the to the numbers of people to give you their first name, last name title around the. Company from the lack of openness. Is nice and less and less. Less and less. Yeah that's because the person who floated the marketing automation stuff I didn't tell you about cascading forms so you can ask them to have bits and pieces as you go down if you're going to do that. But then that's your next bit of friction. How much information you want information and how much information do you want? Yeah. And then the final bit of friction is what's the content like? Is any good? Who told you it was any good? Yeah. And that's what that's, that's the kicker because I've always said, you know, Google are the, the preeminent custodian almost of content because they're the ones that say is any. Good, but they are better, aren't they? So they actually they look at your content and they, they just assess it like we talked about before. Has it got all of those necessary components that say this is a good piece of content? They're not built in the actual words that are written. They're looking at the actual construction of the page. They they can see the grammar because we do that the flash Kinkaid thing, I think, is called. Word. Within word that tells you how readable it is. And it's got to be written for 12 year old. Yeah, it's called Be Straightforward. And this is a proper full on technical document. It's got to be written for 12 year old and so they can see does it, is it written or easily police bullet points. No no lists H1, H2, H3 headings pictures graphics and graphs embedded videos and so on and so on his own links has he got inbound links as he got outbound links to whatever it knows if it's a decent piece of content as you got all of that and then you go and if you've because it's being hidden with most companies, you never know if it's written properly or well enough anyway. And the other side is, I mean, like I read, I read. Okay, so a 256 page document put out by a very, very large IBM company because I don't know whether I should say the name or not. I don't think I should, but very, very, very large, very, very well known. IBM company, who the CMO used to work for a previous very, very, very large marketing automation platform. And now they sell IBM and on page ten this particular person who's well known on LinkedIn said, I know that and none of us like giving out details out most of all may I hate giving out my details. And if someone tries to contact me cold, I'll give them an absolute dressing down and give them stick because if they're asking me for my details, because we want to be anonymous, everybody wants to be anonymous. Anyway, that said, we've cos we've got some really clever little bits of software that can do a reverse IP lookup so you can actually nail them. And stop. Them and stalk them or find out who they are. It's like give me a break. So this is what it so they know people don't want it, they know people don't want to be treated like that. And back in the day, a long time ago, when I first started selling, there was a word that had already become outdated, which was being a prospect being called a mark. And I think in like hassling and, and theft and pickpocketing, you had mark, there was. A TV program, wasn't the code hustle. And they used to refer to that. Yeah. There were markets as Mark. So they called Mark's. Now do you now now translate that and put that into our current way of selling. They are called Mark's. They are people to be nailed the way a second. That makes me a mark. That makes you a mark. That makes you the listener a mark. We're all Mark's. So what suddenly we become a different species because we might want to buy something. We are there to be stitched up with, there to be screwed over go. Oh, heaven forfend show today I don't mean that we'll take it out of your downloadable document then. And don't you haven't inferred it then. Absolutely said it you took you to a list. You can't go. Go do it. Reverse IP, look up and there is a handful of companies and that's exactly what they do. So all these people that have been filling out that, you know, they give you the name, address and details by using the reverse IP, look up your information goes into a data like what did Cambridge Analytica get spanked for because of all the data that they had because they harvested all this data. Facebook had harvested it, harvested it and everything went to pot. But it's been used. Oh, it's all legitimate within B2B so reverse IP lookup says we know it's X, Y, Z company on the High Street. They're a big B2B company right now. Next stage, get into LinkedIn, check them out. Who's the people who are the players in LinkedIn right now? We know that they're looking at so we can find who the CMO is, the CEO, the CFO the CMO, the save, you know, the CTO and everyone else. So we could find out the complete C-suite simply by doing a reverse IP look up and knowing the name of the company and if you are Ice-T Empire from Ice-T, and if you're fiber optic pipe that's got your uses that connects you to the Internet, it has been named. They know exactly who you are straightway. So you screw it and it's like, wait a second. And that's what's happening with everyone. And so you think, Well, go down an ABM route. Yeah. Because then we can we can pitch to everybody. That I just think it's so I don't know this isn't about it that makes it for me. And I just think it's just so unethical that, you know, me as a browser, me as I put myself in the buy shoes, I want to browse and privately, I don't want anybody knowing what I'm looking at and because I want the opportunity to be able to. Apple, you're invisible. Everyone is getting upset with Apple because, you know, oh, we could, we could we're going to we're going to hide you. We're going to maintain your privacy. And we don't want to do that. We we we want to chuck cookies on everyone. And I may be able to to identify them and do really. But I do think, though, that you want to be able you know, one wants to be able to browse in private. And when I'm ready, then I'll I'll reach out and make contact. But not before. I don't I, I really object to it. And I used to be in sales, you know, I used to make phone calls. I was telesales person, you know, I know what it's like. Yeah. But I also know what it's like being on the other side of it. And I also, you know, the companies that do bring you up and say, oh, you were looking at our website. It's not an invoice. You write well, it's like, yeah, I was. Well, what were you looking for? Well, actually, I know you really wanted to say, yeah, it's none of you, but I actually, I don't want to discuss it with you. Or I might say, well, actually, I didn't see what I wanted to annotate, actually want to engage in conversation but I do feel it's it's unethical, it's intrusive, and I just genuinely don't think that's the way to do business. I think the way to do business is to show your customers that you care. And the way to show that you care is by producing the content that they need to make a decision. Because ultimately, as a buyer and I think the more the more expensive your offering is, if you want to put it like this or the more complex. The second point the sale is the the prospect wants to self educate. Yeah well they don't want to do is they don't want to waste their time with products that are not fit for their purpose because the chances are, you know, if you sell a piece of software, you're going to have competition in your market, in your space. But it's likely that your software to something that somebody else is software doesn't do. So there might be only one or two players that do something specific for that prospect. So what the prospect wants to do is the prospect wants to eliminate all the people that don't provide that and that don't provide that. And I think because, you know, with both of us have been in that situation, where it's easy to go like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can do that as a software provider. Oh, yeah, yeah, we can do it. We can like that into our software, not only to write it into the software. I want to know that it's done and it's available to me right now. Yeah. So I just think prospects, we need to be treating our prospects with respect that they actually have a degree of an intelligence. Well, if we, we you may listener we three are the prospect. Yeah. We have bright enough to go, well, I want to listen to a podcast. I want to see this, I want to watch this, I want to listen to that. I want to download X, Y, and Z but. You want it now. I think you want to do it in your you want to do it in your own time. We're not limited now to this nine to five scenario. People want to do it in their own time. And I think that's that's one of the significant changes that's happened. But also, I don't as a buyer, I do not want to waste my time because I've got other things to do, but I do not want to waste my time talking to five or six different companies that, you know, I've had to give my email address and or my phone number or whatever, and they're wasting my time because they can't provide the service that I want. I actually want to narrow down my my search and I should be able to do that through the content that's provided. Yeah. I mean, and the thing about that, the big the big thing about that is the, the fundamental error that we we've all done it. We've all made this error, you know, including, you know, I've, I've done that. I've, I've employed I think 40 people was the maximum I employed. But, you know, we've recruited people and the, the logic and mentality was that it would go down a one to one sales process. So you get an inquiry, your sales person goes out and looks to communicate one to one with that prospect. And there has been until now there has been and is had been nothing wrong with that. But it's different now we you have the ability to sell once a minute. You couldn't do it before now. You can so if you produce the content, produce the information and produce the podcasts, the videos, and we're not talking about big flashy corporate videos. We're talking about how to make. Videos, videos that people need. And the proof of the pudding is what's on YouTube. You can see what people watch and what what and how they engage with what's on there and with livestream streaming. So a business is a requirement now nowadays is you want to be able to sell one to many. In order to do that, you make a point of creating this content that's freely available and referenced Apple on Google, which means it increases your exposure. You make it available and to the point of enabling prospects to buy without speaking to anyone. You might some people oh, we could never do that because we think think about the reason you're saying because and now you work towards adapting your business to accommodate the fact that that's what this is about. Yeah, it may well be that you absolutely refuse to do and I'm talking about as a personal choice, you refuse to do it. But if you can come by hundred and 55 Tesla online, you can, you can, you can just as well sell your product. I think. Need. To be honest. I think it is the reality of where we are going and I think it is very naive and very very shortsighted to think that we continue can't continue with the same sales and marketing models that we used to. Three years ago. I think it's like saying, you know, go out and knock on doors and that is exactly this, you know, go on, go out and knock on doors, go to business parks, knock on business to, you know, what are the chances of reaching somebody in an office now? But I think it's exactly the same mentality and I, I think if you, you want to continue down that route, I think the only way, you know, it's diminishing returns. Yeah. It was already getting to that point of diminishing returns. But the last two years have proven that, you know, businesses do continue to to grow and businesses do continue to sell their products. But we have to accept that things are changing. And if you don't move with the times, you get left behind, as simple as that. But talking before about the CMO and the tenure of CMO, I I think I mentioned this about the 350 grand one off. I didn't. Did I know you didn't. So so just just to kind of fit we're going to kind of wrap this up in a minute, but just to I saw an advert, a job description for CMO and this is cash for this is, this is UK. They were offering a 350 grand one off payment and 350 grand a year for a CMO we think, wow, you have to process that one. That's the first thing. The second one wasn't just one, it was multiples the salaries that are being offered a pushing of up to 50 grand a year, certain roles so what does that say that says to me to CEOs and private equity and different organizations can see that as a problem. They don't know how to rectify it, but they think throw money at it, it's going to work. Now, here's the kicker. What these people want are dyed in the wool or if that's what the expression full on experienced multiple decade chief marketing officers are going to flip their businesses the trouble is, it was the decade old CMO that were causing the problem in the first place. That's why we're in the problem in the in a situation that we are now because of them. So chucking 350 grand a year at them ain't going to make any difference. Well, a bad strategy is a bad strategy, whether you throw money at it or not. A simple assumption is that I. Do this a job. I can do that. If you want anyone that says Boy, boy from the black stuff that was out. Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, you got to walk in. Of course. Of course you can do it. You want to pay me 700 grand in the first year? Of course. I can do it. I just need a £10 million budget. Marketing budget. I'll knock out what you want. Oh, you want me to do it with a less. Oh. Oh, that is nonsense. Because it's so open to abuse and whoo hoo hoo is qualified to recruit that person. If you're chucking 700 grand at someone, anybody can pitch up and black it because the recruiter, the headhunter, they're not qualified. Absolutely not qualified. No. And nor the people within the business because they're chucking out so much money. But I think it I think it just sends a very loud and clear message that, you know, if we throw enough money, if we throw enough money at it, it'll work. You know, hey, Sly, you know, it's like saying, okay, so you've got a car with I don't know, it's got three wheels and it's not a robbery line. It's, you know, it's a proper car. And it doesn't matter how much petrol you put in it that car was never going to those cars, never going to work because it's only got three wheels is Ford. So you can imagine that, Robert. The one pulled handles on it rolled over on the ground. So I'm in Enfield and in north north London. And this Rob in Berlin has gone round this roundabout and it's rolled over and being the hero, stop with a stop. My car ran over and grabbed hold of the door handle to open the door and I ripped the doors for the door handle.

00 and the car the other side. What did you do then. Didn't push the oh to right it. It just pushed it pushed it over. And carried on. I think this handle is yours you know, the thing that this thing about this is that it's not going away is absolutely not going away. And there's a couple of things we'll finish off now because we've got so I've, I've got another podcast that has been recorded and this, this, the next podcast is actually for C.F. OHS. It's a really important part of this will point to this. That is a financial issue. This is a big deal. The whole marketing thing is a massive deal and it's going wrong and I've done a podcast for CFOs and another one for CEOs to explain what can be done to put it right. It's not about and by myself way or by our services. It's all there, it's written out, it's done, it's all laid out. New org charts, new strategies, absolutely everything end to end. Yeah. You know, call us and get involved and we'll make it happen quicker. But bearing in mind you're marketing people and the people that are looking to generate new business have been looking at doing the same thing over and over again, and they're failing. So to do what? I've been in business 35 years, so it's going to take them a lot to catch up so but the point is, is that we've everything's on our website, everything's there, everything's accessible. There are downloads and videos and podcasts and livestreams and articles. There's everything that we take you about a month, six weeks to read through and watch everything. But by the end of that, anybody that does that, there'll be a superstar but that is the bottom line. But the main thing is, is that there is light at the end of the tunnel. That's that's what we're absolutely saying. And it's not about throwing stupid money after bad. No. You know, it's to do this. It is. It's just about understanding if, for example, you had your time over again, you could start your business again. The way you would do it is you would make sure you knew who you market was and that the methods you had to attract them were working. And then you'd start the business instead. What's happened? Businesses have started longest businesses that are no longer in the tooth have started and gone through those processes. The world changed. So now it's about putting something in place that will take a while to get set up but it will gradually replace what you've got in situ at the moment. And that's what this is about, is recognizing the problem, knowing what can be done to put it right and setting a timescale to go and action. It it's an asset. Yeah. So that's some good night from me. The short one we plus yeah. I've got my glasses on the night, but anyway, I hope we enjoy this. We've got the another podcast going up tomorrow and we're looked at to get this done on a more regular basis. And it's the challenges in a ways is it is we want to try and keep it fresh and that's the point. And you know, we'll talk about the things that we come across and some of the points we come across because this is common is it becoming a more popular subject about the, the failures within marketing and and people have thrown their hands are going well we just don't know what to do. Yeah. Well, fortunately we do so if you if you are okay with that, check us out on the website and we'll catch you all on the next one so far for me. But I.