Marketing Qualified

Mike Griffin & Chris Newton
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Weekly

Welcome to the Marketing Qualified Podcast, your home for discussion on all marketing things that are utterly f*****g absurd. Co-hosts Chris Newton and Mike Griffin have 20+ years of marketing experience between them. Said differently: They've seen some shit.Tune in every week(ish) for a new, less than 40 minute long episode, with discussions ranging from failed marketing tactics to marketing facts to campaign ideas to profanity laden rants about whatever may be top of mind. You may even learn something new.Visit us at www.marketingqualified.io or follow us on your favorite social network of choice, as long as that social network is Instagram, because we don't have anything else (and neither should you).

  1. Jul 14

    The B2B SaaS Homepage Mad Lib From Hell

    Send us Fan Mail $84 billion is a number so big it stops feeling real until you tie it to a decision: Meta’s metaverse bet, the full-company pivot, and the brutal reality that a product can still flop even with unlimited resources. We dig into why building something nobody asked for is the fastest way to burn money, trust, and time and why the fallout rarely lands where it should.  We also get into the part that makes marketers grit their teeth: accountability. When leadership makes a massive swing and misses, who actually pays the price? We talk incentives, ego, and the weird immunity that seems to follow public-company CEOs, plus a spicy thought experiment about whether AI could make better executive decisions if you feed it the right inputs and constraints.  Then we let the chaos loose and brainstorm other ways to “light $84B on fire,” from breaking the Google Ads auction to sending a personalized GIF cold email to every human on Earth, with side quests through GA4 frustration and marketing spend absurdity. The finale is an “ultimate B2B SaaS homepage Mad Lib” that skewers the same tired patterns we all see: vague outcomes, fake urgency, buzzword soup, and the dreaded question, “How’s the pipeline?”  If you care about B2B SaaS marketing, product market fit, conversion rate optimization, demand generation, and writing homepage copy that actually earns attention, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a marketer who needs the laugh, and leave a review with the worst buzzword you’ve seen this week. Visit us at https://www.marketingqualified.io Follow us on Instagram Email us at pod@marketingqualified.io

  2. Jul 7

    When Marketing Becomes Disposable Who Pays The Price

    Send us Fan Mail A lot of marketing advice sounds “scientific” right up until you try to run it with real-world constraints like low traffic, messy attribution, and bosses who want certainty on demand. We get back on Zoom and do what we do best: argue our way toward the truth, starting with why most A/B tests are too small to be statistically meaningful and why teams still declare winners anyway. If you’ve ever changed a CTA color, stared at a conversion rate graph, and felt deep doubt, you’ll feel seen.  Then we take on influencer marketing fraud, from bot followers to inflated click claims to sponsorships that look great in a deck and disappear in HubSpot. We talk about how to validate performance with UTMs, how vanity metrics distort spend decisions, and why “reach” is a risky north star in B2B SaaS marketing. After that, we dig into marketing dashboards and the unspoken reality that many reports exist to defend work, not to drive action, especially under intense ROI pressure and pipeline scrutiny.  We also debate freemium vs free trial, including bottom-up adoption, support load, and what a real upgrade path requires. To close, we play “Benchmark or B******t” with SaaS benchmarks like churn, CAC payback period, cold email reply rates, and SEO content timelines, then end with a hard-hitting LinkedIn quote about layoffs and why great marketers are quietly leaving the field. Subscribe for more, share this with a marketer who’s tired of fake certainty, and leave a review with the metric you trust the least. Visit us at https://www.marketingqualified.io Follow us on Instagram Email us at pod@marketingqualified.io

  3. Jun 30

    What If There’s No Such Thing As Free Marketing

    Send us Fan Mail Your homepage might be the page everyone argues about, but it’s rarely the page that closes the deal. We kick things off with a round of Marketing Mythbusters, using a mix of real-world experience and hard-earned opinions to separate “common marketing wisdom” from what actually drives conversions in B2B and SaaS. We get specific about the pages buyers care about most, why pricing and integrations can matter more than a glossy homepage, and why sending paid traffic to a generic home page is usually a waste. From there we hit the fantasy that marketing success happens overnight, including the classic leadership request to “just go viral,” and why that mindset leads to short-term thinking instead of sustainable demand generation. Then we dig into practical conversion rate optimization: shorter forms tend to win, progressive profiling and enrichment can replace redundant questions, and paid ads never guarantee sales without a strong post-click experience. We also talk channel strategy the simple way: you don’t need to be on every social platform, you need to be where your buyer persona is, and customer interviews are still one of the fastest ways to find the truth. We close with a real conversation about the current job market and the trade-offs between staying on the job hunt versus starting your own business, including a frustrating look at reference checks and roles that disappear mid-process. If this helped you rethink your go-to-market, subscribe, share the show with a marketer who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find us. What’s one marketing myth you want us to bust next? Visit us at https://www.marketingqualified.io Follow us on Instagram Email us at pod@marketingqualified.io

  4. Jun 9

    Marketing Isn’t Smarter Until It Stops Shouting

    Send us Fan Mail Your feed is full, your attention is not and that gap is where modern marketing gets messy. We get into the idea of “LinkedIn slop”: the wave of low-value, AI-generated, samey posts that turn professional social media into an echo chamber. We talk about why it’s happening, how content saturation rewards volume over originality, and why scrolling can leave you feeling worse even when you’re “learning.” We also pull back the curtain on ghostwriting and AI thought leadership. If a CEO’s post is crafted by someone else (or trained into an LLM), is it still authentic? We debate whether the value is in the ideas themselves or in the authority of the name attached to them, and why intent matters when the real goal is still marketing, demand generation, and sales. Then we shift to the job market and what it’s like to look for work right now. We unpack the Open to Work banner, recruiter perceptions, negotiation leverage, and why layoffs in tech need to be destigmatized. From there, we connect it to the rise of fractional work and 1099 consulting, where companies dodge benefits and employees spread risk across multiple clients. If you care about B2B marketing strategy, marketing automation, data-driven marketing, and building signal in a world that keeps turning up the volume, you’ll take a lot from this one. Subscribe, share it with a friend who’s doom-scrolling, and leave a review with your take: is marketing getting smarter or just louder? Visit us at https://www.marketingqualified.io Follow us on Instagram Email us at pod@marketingqualified.io

  5. Jun 2

    When Gated Content Stops Working In B2B Marketing

    Send us Fan Mail Your best “lead magnet” might be driving away your best buyers. We dig into the gated content debate from the only angle that really matters: value exchange. If content is increasingly commoditized and personal data is increasingly expensive, asking for an email just to unlock a PDF can be a bad trade for the prospect and a noisy metric for your team. We talk through why this shows up as lower lead to pipeline conversion, slower pipeline velocity, and a CRM full of contacts who never intended to buy.  From there we get tactical. We break down when ungating makes sense for modern B2B marketing and demand generation, especially when SEO and discoverability are part of the strategy. If Google cannot crawl the asset, it cannot help you build authority. We also get into what to do instead: publish the content on an optimized URL, measure real engagement, retarget based on behavior, and use intent signals to prioritize the right accounts. We even explore higher value alternatives to ebooks, like interactive tools and ROI calculators that give prospects immediate outputs while capturing cleaner qualifying data.  Then we shift to the job market and the “shared math” reality check. One question exposes a broken go to market motion fast: how many sales reps hit quota last quarter? When the answer is zero and the CEO is carrying sales, marketing is often expected to be the savior, even when timelines ignore the actual sales cycle. We close with a candid take on fractional marketing, why part time should not mean on call, and how to set boundaries that protect both the marketer and the client.  If this sparked ideas, subscribe, share the episode with a marketing friend, and leave a review. Are you team gate, team ungate, or team “it depends on the value”? Visit us at https://www.marketingqualified.io Follow us on Instagram Email us at pod@marketingqualified.io

  6. May 26

    Cannolis And Chaos Marketing Wisdom

    Send us Fan Mail Bad marketing advice doesn’t just waste time. It quietly teaches teams to chase noise, copy bigger competitors, and measure activity instead of impact. We’re celebrating a weird little milestone, episode 20, by doing a rapid-fire teardown of the worst marketing tips we keep seeing in the wild and the damage they cause when teams follow them “because that’s what you’re supposed to do.” We start with the classics: “More content is always better” and “SEO isn’t that important, just write for people.” We unpack why AI has made content volume meaningless, why quality and originality matter more than ever, and why technical SEO still decides whether your best work gets discovered at all. If your robots.txt or site setup blocks crawlers, “writing for humans” won’t save you. We also dig into the strategic lie that never dies: “You can target everyone.” Great messaging needs an ICP, sharp positioning, and the discipline to say no. Then we move into the tactics that can tank your brand and pipeline fast: “If it’s not working, send more emails,” plus the obsession with over-follow-up that kills deliverability and trust. We also talk rebranding and brand equity, including the HBO Max to Max saga, and we share a real example of gating a commercial video behind a form, which is basically asking people to trade attention for spam.  If you’ve ever heard advice that sounded smart in a meeting but failed in real life, you’ll feel seen. Subscribe to Marketing Qualified, share this with a marketer who needs it, and leave a review. What’s the worst marketing advice you’ve ever been given? Visit us at https://www.marketingqualified.io Follow us on Instagram Email us at pod@marketingqualified.io

  7. May 19

    From GTM Engineers To Dog Playboy Mailers

    Send us Fan Mail The fastest way to create a “movement” is to make people feel behind. We start with the uneasy vibe a lot of teams are feeling right now, especially when AI tools are pushed into engineering and marketing workflows in ways that feel less like help and more like pressure. If you have ever wondered whether “innovation” is actually code for cost-cutting, you will feel this one. Then we get into the main event: the claim that Clay is manufacturing the go-to-market engineer movement. We react to a viral breakdown that argues the role barely exists outside Clay and the agencies selling Clay services, and we compare it to the old Salesforce admin boom where companies needed specialists just to keep their CRM running. The bigger question for go-to-market strategy and product marketing is whether complexity is a moat or a tax, and whether the next wave of AI makes workflows simpler or just creates new dependence. After that, we take a hard left into direct mail marketing with a Bark.co piece that is bold, weird, and impossible to ignore. We unpack the mechanics behind it: QR codes, dedicated landing pages, UTM parameters, and the practical tradeoffs between cloning pages versus relying on clean attribution. We also hit visual hierarchy in ads, link placement lessons from social, and a final rant about LinkedIn becoming every platform at once, including dating. If you like sharp takes on B2B marketing, demand generation, marketing ops, and the hype cycles that shape SaaS, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves a good roast, and leave a review so more marketers can find us. Visit us at https://www.marketingqualified.io Follow us on Instagram Email us at pod@marketingqualified.io

  8. May 13

    Is Your Marketing Built On Strategy Or Hype

    Send us Fan Mail A “genius” marketing tactic can turn into a dead end in a matter of days, and that whiplash is exactly where we start. We react to the rollback of ChatGPT conversations showing up in search results and unpack the bigger lesson for SEO, content strategy, and demand gen: test new channels, but never bet your whole engine on a trend you don’t control. If you’ve ever watched LinkedIn crown a “must-do” play that disappears a week later, you’ll feel this one. From there, we keep it light while still keeping it real: Subway vs Quiznos nostalgia turns into a surprisingly sharp conversation about product quality, franchise incentives, and why a good product can still lose to bad management. We also talk about brand chaos, including a headline where a thrown Subway sandwich leads to a felony assault charge, and what it must be like to work in crisis comms when the internet hands you a new fire every morning. Then we jump to the future of search and distribution. Perplexity floating a $34.5B offer to buy Google Chrome raises questions about antitrust, AI search competition, and how much “ranking” will matter across Google Search, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLM-driven answers. We also vent about websites demanding your location for no clear reason, argue for explaining data requests like a human, and make the case that the “one app” that does everything might just be your browser. If you like smart marketing opinions with a little salt, hit subscribe, share this with a friend who needs to stop chasing trends, and leave a review so more marketers can find us. Visit us at https://www.marketingqualified.io Follow us on Instagram Email us at pod@marketingqualified.io

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About

Welcome to the Marketing Qualified Podcast, your home for discussion on all marketing things that are utterly f*****g absurd. Co-hosts Chris Newton and Mike Griffin have 20+ years of marketing experience between them. Said differently: They've seen some shit.Tune in every week(ish) for a new, less than 40 minute long episode, with discussions ranging from failed marketing tactics to marketing facts to campaign ideas to profanity laden rants about whatever may be top of mind. You may even learn something new.Visit us at www.marketingqualified.io or follow us on your favorite social network of choice, as long as that social network is Instagram, because we don't have anything else (and neither should you).

Information

  • Creator
    Mike Griffin & Chris Newton
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    25
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Marketing Qualified
  • Show Website
    Marketing Qualified