Data Beats Opinion

Keith Perhac

Thoughts & Interviews with experts who improve their business with data. Learn how to improve your marketing and revenue with straight-forward strategies you can do today.

  1. How to grow without ads, algorithms, or cold outreach

    Apr 6 ·  Video

    How to grow without ads, algorithms, or cold outreach

    Why does every marketing channel feel broken right now?⚠️ Ads are expensive. SEO is getting buried under AI overviews. Cold outreach is noise. So what actually works? Turns out, it's the same thing that worked before Facebook ads existed: relationships and owned distribution. In this episode of Data Beats Opinion, SegMetrics founder Keith Perhac sits down with Greg Digneo — founder of Content Guppy and a 20-year marketing veteran — to break down the owned distribution revolution. Greg makes the case that one good partnership conversation can replace a thousand cold emails, why founder-led content consistently outperforms polished marketing, and how to build a growth engine that doesn't break every time an algorithm changes. E-commerce success means learning the new rules for trust, security and growth in 2026 What you'll discover: Three street-tested strategies to grow your email list (even if you’re starting small) How to take control of your own distribution (no more “walled gardens” or “Google Tax”) Strategies to streamline founder-led content with AI How to measure the value of different lead sources Show Notes [00:00] Meet Greg Digneo [02:00] How cheap Facebook ads killed affiliate marketing [03:00] The partnership revolution [06:13] What a modern partnership looks like [09:31] Why the internet is becoming a walled garden [13:53] How Google killed the affiliate listicle game [17:43] Owned distribution explained [19:32] What most people get wrong about their email list [20:46] How Greg actually builds owned distribution [24:27] Finding qualified leads hiding in your email list [27:00] One to one to many [28:18] How creators vs SaaS think about owned distribution [29:00] Why the old SaaS playbook is breaking down [32:21] How SegMetrics turned off $15K in ads and grew [33:46] When Greg stopped recommending SEO [36:04] People follow people, not brands [38:00] Parasocial relationships and founder-led content [40:22] Founders who get out there grow faster [42:02] How to create content when you hate creating content [44:40] Repurposing conversations into newsletters and posts [45:49] How to use AI to streamline founder-led content [49:41] Where to find Greg Subscribe for monthly episodes covering conversion optimization, content strategy, copywriting, and other growth tactics that actually move the needle. About the Guest: Greg Digneo is the founder of Content Guppy, which helps B2B SaaS companies grow through owned distribution and organic visibility. With 20+ years of marketing experience, Greg has evolved Content Guppy from a traditional SEO agency into a partnership-first growth model — helping SaaS brands build audience presence that outlasts algorithm changes and paid ad volatility. Connect with Greg on LinkedIn or at Content Guppy. About SegMetrics: Why Choose SegMetrics? • Instant clarity on what is and isn’t working in your business • Full-funnel analytics that lets you optimize every marketing touch point for revenue • Unify your cross-platform data into a single source of truth Better data → Smarter decisions → Faster growth. Accelerate your growth with SegMetrics. Learn more https://segmetrics.io/ Get Started Today: • Learn how SegMetrics can uncover your hidden profits: https://segmetrics.io/ • Start a 14-day free trial: https://segmetrics.io/pricing • Book a demo: https://segmetrics.io/book-a-demo #partnerships #growthmarketing #SEO #ai #segmetrics Chapters (00:00:00) - Meet Greg Digneo(00:02:00) - How cheap Facebook ads killed affiliate marketing(00:03:00) - The partnership revolution(00:06:13) - What a modern partnership looks like(00:09:31) - Why the internet is becoming a walled garden(00:13:53) - How Google killed the affiliate listicle game(00:17:43) - Owned distribution explained(00:19:32) - What most people get wrong about their email list(00:20:46) - How Greg actually builds owned distribution(00:24:27) - Finding qualified leads hiding in your email list(00:27:00) - One to one to many(00:28:18) - How creators vs SaaS think about owned distribution(00:29:00) - Why the old SaaS playbook is breaking down(00:32:21) - How SegMetrics turned off $15K in ads and grew(00:33:46) - When Greg stopped recommending SEO(00:36:04) - People follow people, not brands(00:38:00) - Parasocial relationships and founder-led content(00:40:22) - Founders who get out there grow faster(00:42:02) - How to create content when you hate creating content(00:44:40) - Repurposing conversations into newsletters and posts(00:45:49) - How to use AI to streamline founder-led content(00:49:41) - Where to find Greg

    51 min
  2. Why outbound sales just got interesting again

    06/30/2025 ·  Video

    Why outbound sales just got interesting again

    Outbound sales is undergoing a complete transformation — and most marketers are missing it entirely. In this debut episode of Data Beats Opinion, SegMetrics founder Keith Perhac sits down with Harris Kenny (founder of OutboundSync) to explore how AI, programmatic outbound, and precision targeting are revolutionizing cold outreach. What you'll discover: How companies are achieving 40% phone connect rates using propensity scoring The "programmatic outbound" shift happening across every channel How AI agents research prospects to find hyper-specific targeting opportunities Why outbound attribution is broken (and agencies are getting 2-3x less credit) The quality renaissance: why personalized outreach beats AI-generated spam Show Notes [00:00] Intro [02:11] Going from agency to SaaS [07:41] The current state of Outbound Sales [11:00] Parallel dialing, propensity scoring and other advanced phone tactics [14:21] AI-powered segmentation [16:21] Outbound as a marketing strategy [21:05] When & how to start outbound [25:40] The ROI on agencies [29:41] Measuring outbound success [32:37] Outbound & advanced attribution [34:19] Quality vs. AI-spam [38:17] How to reach offline industries [46:40] Favorite metrics? Subscribe for monthly episodes covering conversion optimization, content strategy, copywriting, and other growth tactics that actually move the needle. ABOUT THE GUEST Harris Kenny is founder of OutboundSync, helping companies integrate outbound campaigns with HubSpot and Salesforce. 15+ years in go-to-market strategy, closed hundreds of deals from startups to Fortune 150. Previously ran Gold Tier HubSpot agency before building OutboundSync (TinySeed-backed). Connect with Harris on LinkedIn ( / harriskenny ) or via https://outboundsync.com/. ABOUT SEGMETRICS Why Choose SegMetrics?  Instant clarity on what is and isn’t working in your business Full-funnel analytics that lets you optimize every marketing touch point for revenue Unify your cross-platform data into a single source of truth Better data → Smarter decisions → Faster growth. Accelerate your growth with SegMetrics. Get Started Today: Learn how SegMetrics can uncover your hidden profits: https://segmetrics.io/ Start a 14-day free trial: https://segmetrics.io/pricing Book a demo: https://segmetrics.io/book-a-demo Chapters (00:00:00) - Intro(00:02:11) - Going from agency to SaaS(00:07:41) - The current state of Outbound Sales(00:11:00) - Parallel dialing, propensity scoring and other advanced phone tactics(00:14:21) - AI-powered segmentation(00:16:21) - Outbound as a marketing strategy(00:21:05) - When & how to start outbound(00:25:40) - The ROI on agencies(00:29:41) - Measuring outbound success(00:32:37) - Outbound & advanced attribution(00:34:19) - Quality vs AI-spam(00:38:17) - How to reach offline industries(00:46:40) - Favorite metrics?

    49 min
  3. Revenue Attribution and B2B Sales with Steffen Hedebrandt - Data Beats Opinion

    06/22/2022

    Revenue Attribution and B2B Sales with Steffen Hedebrandt - Data Beats Opinion

    Potent Quotes: Steffen Hedebrandt:  No. Even just for ourselves, I know, obviously, we do multi-touch tracking all itself, and just for a demo call to be booked on our website, normally, it takes five sessions. And that typical pattern will be the true referral source initially, which could be an ad or something else, then it could be an organic visit, and then maybe you see three direct visits afterwards. And if you want to look at the original source fields in your CM system, it'll tell you, "Oh, this is one converted from a direct visit." But, what you're not seeing is that you actually spend money on starting that journey, which means either you're growing a lot slower than you could do, or you're just wasting a lot of money because you can't really connect your spend to the business outcome that you're trying to achieve. Keith Perhac:  Right, exactly. And what I've seen in a lot of ... Because I think CRMs are starting to ... They want to have the bullet point of, "Oh, we track attribution," right? When they have the bare minimum that they need to be able to say that. But even something like ads, where you're looking at, now, branded search where ... Essentially, the Google tax. You have to be spending all this money in order to be ranking high in Google, and the CRMs are attributing that as paid traffic, even though, really, it shouldn't be paid traffic, because it's not, right? It's a tax. So, that's something where a system like yours, or what we do, becomes more important because you need to be able to drill into that more than just the top level, like, "Oh, it was an ad." Steffen Hedebrandt:  Yeah. But I think we can at least see, typically, when we look at, for example, the paid channel, there's 3 to 5x difference in terms of you understanding the world as a last touch world, or the true first touch, which means if you can invest 5x the amount of money into your marketing, then you're going to completely outgrow your competition. Steffen Hedebrandt:  And we just released some benchmarks from our own customers now, and we can see that, on average, there were 32 touches involved in an account from first touch to a deal being won, and you know, I really, honestly don't think that one touch makes a difference except that, actually, I think if there were one touch, it would be the first touch that you are actually able to get in front of the person who started that journey with you. Steffen Hedebrandt: Forget about that funnel and just focus on getting quality touches in front of people every week. Do high-quality content, do high-quality calls, do high-quality meetings. Just pegging those high-quality touches along the way. It would be nice if there were such a thing as a data recipe for what to do, but I fear you would end up in a too-average place to say something smart. Keith Perhac:  I think that's always the challenging part about analytics, especially in the agency world, because there are always 800 ways to slice the data. And whether consciously or not, you tend to go towards the one that makes you look better. Steffen Hedebrandt:  I think there's a lot of things that are interesting, but one of them is an average journey from the first touch to a B2B deal being won is 192 days. Steffen Hedebrandt:  Yeah. There's nothing as dangerous as a pretty graph. Steffens  go-to-market benchmark 2022

    34 min
  4. SEO and Content Promotion with Alan Silvestri - Data Beats Opinion

    06/08/2022

    SEO and Content Promotion with Alan Silvestri - Data Beats Opinion

    Keith Perhac: Hello and welcome to Data Beats Opinion. I am Keith Perhac. And I'm here together with Alan Silvestri. He is the founder and director of strategy at Growth Gorilla. And in your own words, Growth Gorilla is a no BS content promotion and distribution agency for B2B SaaS companies. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. Alan Silvestri: Hi Keith. It's great to be here. And so yeah, the no BS part, I actually took it out of the name and I was listening to one of your older episodes where you were talking about and making fun of people that have the no BS part in the name, so it's appropriate as well. We don't have that anymore now. Keith Perhac: It's hilarious. It's so funny how quickly that whole... The view of those things changes. Eight years ago, nine years ago, that was like, okay this is something that's brand new. People are BSing us all over the place. Putting that in, it's like, "Yes, this is a straight shooter." And then as soon as something gets popular like that everyone's like, "Wait a minute. We're all no BS." And it becomes noise at that point. And then you have to find the next one to go onto. Alan Silvestri: Yes, exactly. That's the main reason we didn't want to. We had that for a while. I think we were in the batch of people that were in the first ones to do that, but then it becomes trendy and so yeah, we said just let's leave it. Keith Perhac: Yeah, before that it was, you remember when everything was named Sumo for some odd reason. Alan Silvestri: Oh yeah. Keith Perhac: And then after that it was Sherpa and it was like content Sherpa and all this stuff. And I found out later that Sherpa is a people, in English we always thought, it's a guide, but it's like saying, “Content Indians” or “Content Polish”. It's a group of people. And I was like, "Oh, that doesn't work as well anymore." Alan Silvestri: Yeah. That's one of those SaaS trends, like having the name that finishes with LY. Keith Perhac: LY yep. Yep. Alan Silvestri: Like Calendly basically. Everybody started doing the same thing, yeah. Keith Perhac: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Well, I want to talk today a lot about content promotion and that strategy. I mean, most of us follow the, “Build it and they will come” from Field of Dream strategy and you've worked with a number of people like Podia and UpLead and a bunch of others. And just wanted to talk about how people generally go around content promotion, how they generally think about it and then why they're all wrong - and what you would recommend in those cases. Alan Silvestri: Yeah. So I wouldn't say that everybody is wrong. The main thing that we notice with SaaS companies is that they're very good. Well, for the most part, they're very good at content strategy, content production. So they're really good at knowing the types of keywords that they need to rank for. They are good at knowing the different types of pages that they need to publish. So feature pages, the alternative two kinds of pages. But the problem is that, basically once the content is published, they don't really know what to do with it for the most part. So some of them, what they do is they just do a little bit of social media, reposting content into maybe Infographics or articles or podcasts or stuff like that, which is what I would say is the more classic “content distribution”. Alan Silvestri: So, the way that we see content promotion is a proactive way of taking the content and putting it in front of the right people. And for us, what we do is more content promotion with the main focus of ranking pages higher in Google for the target keywords. So it's content promotion/link building essentially. But yeah, the way that we see it is link building done the right way. So for the main purpose of increasing rankings for your main target pages, that can be the pages that can give you the b...

    39 min

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Thoughts & Interviews with experts who improve their business with data. Learn how to improve your marketing and revenue with straight-forward strategies you can do today.