Funnel Reboot Glenn Schmelzle

Episode 199
Today’s topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn’t concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it’ll shift things.
Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some  average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we’re now able to look at individual audience members and predict how each of them would act upon a message, and at the opportune moment we could have the message show up to each one of them. Goodbye analyzing what happened with crude audience averages, Hello to using detailed data to predict what’s likely to happen. 
With AI holding such promise, why don’t more companies hand things over to AI? I had thought it’s held up by a lack of technical people who know how to do this, but our guest says we’ve had enough technical expertise - He himself was previously one of those data people, and his expertise wasn’t enough to do the job.  He says AI initiatives are held back by those running business functions like marketing who haven’t made the business case and collaborated with the data people to implement this. 
My guest is a leading consultant and former Columbia University and UVA Darden professor. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series, a frequent keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. In 2023 he authored “The AI playbook”
Let’s talk to Eric Siegel.
Links to all people and concepts mentioned are in the shownotes on the Funnel Reboot site.
 
 

Episode 198
A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It’s not that buyers aren’t buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won’t even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival’s product. Only the winning vendor knows that that account uses them for that specific function in their technology stack. All other companies are in the dark.  
 
But are they really? Another way to look at this is that every vendor has information that could be valuable to others. You can find many buyers stacks with products having some overlap but that largely complement each other. As proof, note that lots of these products even integrate with each other because of buyer demand. 
 
Should vendors consider collaborating with vendors they compete against? Aren’t we supposed to hate the competition?
 
We don’t have to. A famous example of that was Apple’s announcement in 1997 of the deal it struck with Microsoft. Steve Jobs defended the deal saying  “If we want to move forward…we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”
 
Zooming to today’s reality, It makes a lot of sense for vendors to collaborate as part of an Ecosystem. By pooling their data together with their indirect competitors, they can see internal buying patterns. Those vendors who hitch their data wagons together get around the ‘nobody talks to our sales rep’ problem, because one of their partners already has the info that rep needs. Using this intel helps them come first in the race for their product to be selected to go in the buyer’s stack. 
 
Our guest today got a Science & Engineering degree from Princeton University and after a stint in the investment world, he dove into co-founding startups. The first was business intelligence platform RJMetrics and the other was cloud data pipeline company Stitch, both of which he saw through to successful exits. 
 
His latest role is as Co-Founder of a platform that safely shares data among companies for this kind of partner-based selling.
 
Outside of work, He is a Trustee for one of America’s top centers of science education and development And an improv comedy performer, in a  team that has performed over 100 shows together.
 
This husband, father of two, is very proud to call Philadelphia home. Let's head there now to meet Bob Moore.
 
Timestamps / Chapters
0:00:00 Intro
00:03:46 Bob’s thesis on how sales is broken
00:11:21 Ecosystems are cause for hope
00:26:13 PSA
00:26:53 Revamping corporate partner practices
00:31:38 Pooling together data
00:55:06 Contacting Bob
 
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for Episode 198
 

Episode 197
Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we’ve exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else's channel to reach their audience, hoping they will buy from us.
Alternatively, we might be the ones who are influential or have a large audience that brands want to reach, so they pay us to be their marketing channel. The name for teaming up like this is affiliate marketing.
Today’s guest came to affiliate marketing through dabbling in online gambling. He watched the incentives sites put out to attract players, and then in 2010, he created a website that reviewed gambling affiliate programs called Gaming Affiliates Guide. This site’s traffic led him to become, you guessed it, an affiliate. Over time, he managed several gambling affiliate sites.
As you progress in this field, you always hit a ceiling with this marketing channel. No matter whether you’re the one needing traffic and paying for it, or the one who has traffic and is turning it into money, everyone gets a headache tracking it. As our guest was deeply involved at this point, getting paid to manage affiliate sites, he saw numerous problems in this industry and saw a way to solve them.
There were already applications that reported affiliate activity, but he saw these technologies' shortcomings. With his engineering degree from the University of Toronto, which had taught him how to develop things, he joined up with partners to create a SaaS tool of their own: StatsDrone.
Having scratched an itch he experienced earlier in his career, he now heads a team whose tool addresses affiliate challenges.
Let’s go to Montreal and hear from John Wright.



Chapter Timestamps:
0:00:00 Intro
00:03:35 Welcome John Wright
00:06:57 Difficulty with Affiliate tracking
00:11:27 Postbacks and tracking methods
00:18:48 tracking dynamic variables
00:23:14 PSA
00:23:54 Tracking affiliate dollars
00:42:13 Contacting John
 
For complete links to the People, Products and Concepts mentioned in the show, go to the episode’s page on the Funnel Reboot site. 
 
 

Episode 196
 
There’s something we take for granted these days, something that wasn’t even possible a short while ago. Let’s go back to 2008, to the first iPhone, the 3G. What you could send & receive with one, if you could afford the data plan, was restricted to voice, text & small images. That’s because at the time, the cellular networks could transmit at around a third of a Megabyte per second, which went up to 2Mb/second when 3G was fully available. Then LTE/4G started becoming available in North America, reaching 97 percent by 2013. With those data speeds, you could watch brief standard definition videos, and social networks like Instagram & Snapchat began letting you record and send short clips. By the late twenty teens, advanced 4G infrastructure was fast enough, from 12 to 80 MPS, for people to watch 4K videos on their devices, bringing platforms like TikTok along with it. Now with 5G out, lag-free high-def video is available almost everywhere. And if you are a marketer trying to reach consumers, it means that  video must be part of the mix. 
 
There are still quirks to these platforms that we need to figure out. Some of their ad units include ecommerce options for selling products while the ad’s in front of them. More broad that this, it’s hard to know how these platforms will react to videos you post. They know so much about a user’s privacy, it’s raised issues of which country that data’s shared with. Clearly, this calls for an expert’s help.  
 
Our guest graduated from San Francisco State University and FIDM with a business degree and started working in-house at consumer eCommerce brands, running their digital marketing programs. After helping brands in every category from skincare & cosmetics to Books to jewelry, she built her own agency team to do this, Pennock, which is named after the rural Minnesota town where her family are from. 
Let’s go to  Northern California where she lives with her husband Tyler and three kids, to talk to Nikki Lindgren.
 
Chapter Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:12 - Welcome Nikki
00:09:05 - Video on platforms like TikTok
00:23:37 - PSA
00:24:26 - Reporting to stakeholders
00:29:59 - Ad campaign optimization
00:35:05 - Contacting Nikki
 
Links to all the people, products and concepts mentioned in show is available on the Funnel Reboot site’s show page.
 

Episode 195
We all want our organization’s decisions to be driven by the numbers. Who wouldn’t want to have at their fingertips analytics that accurately show which course of action will be best.  
But doing this takes analysts, and that doesn’t mean hiring them, it means managing them to function well. It means creating processes for them, Outfitting them with technology. Giving them budgets.It's hard pulling this off in a small or mid-sized organization, and even leaders of large organizations must exercise care when creating this. 
But there’s no set-in-stone law that says a data team must be in-house. Another model, managed services works well for IT and it can be used to give companies access to analysts so they can still be data-driven. 
We’re going to explore the outsourced analytics model with today’s guest. 
Throughout his career, he has worked at the intersection of data, business, and strategy consulting. He earned his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
Following graduation, he joined Cargill as a Data Engineer from June 2011 to November 2013. He went on to serve as the Analytics Lead at Slalom from December 2013 to February 2016, where he claims to have been Minneapolis' first Analytics Hire. 
In 2017, he co-founded DataDrive, a managed service provider specializing in analytics, alongside fellow data enthusiasts.
Let’s talk with Luke Komiskey.
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:14 - Welcome Luke
00:17:38 - PSA
00:18:16 - Calculating value of having good data
00:49:29 - The MSP model
00:49:59 - Where to contact Luke
 
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
 

Episode 194
There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Being honest, doing something differently is often neither better or worse, it’s just different.
- Playing Music with an acoustic vs electric guitar
- Writing with a pen on paper vs a computer. And continuing on that theme, it could be a Mac or a PC
- Programming can be done in various languages
- Films can be made with a variety of filming equipment, anything from an iPhone up to an IMAX ALEXA 65mm
This also applies to what we use as our analytics tool. And though Google Analytics gets a lot of attention, including in this podcast, to be fair, it is not the only game in town. The industry has a second tool,  Adobe Analytics and I wanted to talk with an expert, and to my mind, today’s guest is the person to talk to about it. 
She has 15+ years of experience helping enterprise organizations solve their analytics problems holistically, no matter where they are in their digital measurement evolution or what tool set they use. 
Few can go as deep on pixel implementation, tag management, and data layers as she. 
As a consultant at boutique agency 33 Sticks, she helps clients streamline the implementation process and get more value out of their tools, decreasing costs and headaches for developers, project managers, and analysts alike. On the side, she’s used her background as a developer to create free industry tools like the Adobe Analytics Beacon Parser and the mobile app PocketSDR. 
She loves helping and collaborating with others in the industry, and most days can be found in #measure slack or twitter doing just that.
Let’s go to the Atlanta-area to talk with Jenn Kunz 
 
Chapter Timestamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:21 - Welcome Jenn
00:03:37 - How Adobe's used by larger orgs
00:20:55 - PSA
00:21:32 - Navigating the Interface
00:41:48 - How to contact Jenn
 
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.