The top 3 things bugging CMOs right now

0:03[Music] um all right keep up Nick okay sweet uh ladies and gentlemen welcome to the factory floor uh where we talk about everything we want to and you listen um we are GNA go through um a quote that we have from LinkedIn from uh someone that we all follow semi closely uh his name is Pep laa okay so I'll just read it out for you and then we'll kind of go through some of the the major bullet points and we're just going to kind of like dissect and cut this into pieces but first let's uh introduce ourselves um we have Zack Stevens Zack how you doing I'm fantastic Nick pleasure to be here just get in the mail I got my brand new laptop which I'm super stoked about because now all my insanely layered

0:53Sigma files are going to load at the speed of light we hope and I won't get I won't get cut off in my videos anymore so I'm really looking forward to it that's great fantastic and then we have Corey Haynes Cory how are you uh kind of itchy to be honest I have like a chemical burn from a jacuzzi and it makes my like thighs really itchy okay T is there anything we could do to help you no even if even if even if there was something that we could help with be the fact that he confessed to having a chemical burn itch on our podcast I'm not going to help him you're going to have to sit here and suffer through that I hope this is the one with the most views and tons of people know about your chemical burn okay let's keep as long as

1:38they don't know that it's herpes that's the most important part right yeah we won't talk we'll just the least we won't say that that one's the least bad yeah um and then my name is Nick Lowden I'm doing great thanks for asking um so let's get into this uh this post uh from Pep and I'll just read it real quick it says I surveyed 50 B2B SAS cm um from 50 million to to 1 billion plus in revenue and their most pressing marketing issues right now on their most preing marketing issues right now sorry uh the response was brutal they're spending more to acquire worse customers and here are the top three issues and then he rattles through the top three which are uh increasing customer acquisition costs number one

2:24pipeline development challenges number two and need for brand and marketing differenti a number three um so I fig we'll start with number one and just kind of like uh get a little bit of lay of the land this is the first one so I'm assuming it's the most important um but that's increasing customer acquisition costs uh Corey I know you do the the um the SAS marketing Summit right where you collect all the surveys and the things I'm curious if you felt as though I know these are you know different levels of companies and things like that uh if you felt as though this was all true yeah oh yeah I think it's spot on I mean to be honest it's funny because you look at the top three reasons um and it's all

3:08pointing back to like marketing is really hard and keeps getting harder so like these are all the reasons why marketing is hard and keeps getting harder um so it's not really super surprising on the status ass marketing survey I think that we saw you know definitely the the companies index are at a much smaller scale they're usually in like the half a million to $5 million in R kind of range um but really like that shouldn't change anything at all because everyone's experiencing all the same problems um especially increasing customer acquisition costs CAC uh and I I mean it's interesting that we keep seeing this because marketing was supposed to get easier over time because it's like oh AI uh makes everything way

3:55easier like you can do more for less and everything's so scalable and and the ad platforms are so good but what I think it comes down to is uh competition yeah every time the competition goes up customer acquisition costs are also going to go up because you're it's it's kind of uh it's driving everything up there's the market economics of like where there's more people fighting for the same finite number of people's attention then the the bidding goes up for how much you can pay to acquire that person's attention yeah yeah that's an interest so I think that the the sheer mass of it's interesting how number one and number three are uh greatly intertwined with one another but maybe we'll talk about

4:44that once we get to number three um I was listening to a podcast with Greg mchan who who wrote the book essentialism um and they were kind of breaking down just like the era that we're in as far as like uh Innovation goes so you know you can think back to like the Stone Age then you have the Industrial Revolution then you have the information age is what we were in up until about this point and what they're speculating now is they're actually in the influencer age and that's to circumvent the fact that information became so widely accessible that now you it's not about a limited amount of options it's about an excessive amount of options so the choice Paradox is what's coming into play here where people have way too many

5:28options and they feel like there's so many them to choose from it's like they walked into bask and robins and instead of 31 Flavors there's as many flavors as they could ever want and there's no possible way for them to discern which one is actually going to be the best fit for them um at a surface level at least not without being able to try it or to having something that's a really strong emotional connection to um something that already exists you know like well I'm going to choose pistachio because that's the flavor that my dad always got and that's a more subjective reason um as opposed to a fact actual like well this flavor is objectively better than the other ones that I could choose from

6:04and I think the same thing applies to software companies it's like they're not objectively better they're subjectively better between one another which is makes the decision even harder both of you brought up competition and like that's like kind of the Crux of like okay there's all these competitors um is there so many more competitors because building products like this or products in whatever spaces has gotten way easier is that the main reason why it's like okay now there's you know instead of three big players in a specific niche of an industry there's 25 or 100 is it because people have figured out like hey it's not like that hard to set up a business with a stripe account and to hire a developer and do

6:52this for three months and then have a product like it's not that crazy to go and do that yeah I think it's ease but also think this is just what happens when a market becomes mature the SAS Market is maybe like coming to be around 20 years old now I think it was like the mid 2000s to like the maybe like 2010 was probably like the pivot point where B2B SAS really became an established category and then everybody started jumping on this opportunity to recreate all the manual you know pen and paper and spreadsheet processes into dedicated software platforms a lot of funding followed that from VC a lot of entrepreneurs jumped into the space a lot of people decided to uh innovate and now like Zach mentioned we just have a

7:42plethora of options um and we've kind of we've kind of filled every Gap that we need to essentially like the the essential gaps in the market for what software should exist right and so now every new incremental company that's created to solve this existing uh solved problem just makes it harder and harder for everybody else in that existing category to acquire the same customers um so to me is like this is a mature Market I think the AI and in this next wave will kind of like reshift everything a bit but at the same time like if you look at other industries that are a lot older like I don't know oil or energy or um phones Hardware etc etc like there was I think that apple apple talked about this maybe in

8:36like 2019 or 2020 where they felt like everybody who should have a phone has a phone now so now like the market is just split between Apple users and like Google Android users um a similar thing maybe in SAS where it's like everybody that should have all these software platforms now has their soft stack and now we're more fighting to replace software versus um adding software for the first time yeah in some well it's just I think that maybe they're just not as big anymore you know like you're not going to have that opportunity to create the the kind of platform that can scale across multiple markets that is going to be that dominating thing um it's going to be way more granular as far as the

9:28decision that you make is and which platform you choose like I mean we see this all the time with people even trying to switch between web platforms you know like web flow is has very good use cases for the types of people that we work with which are SAS companies who don't necessarily have a lot of e-commerce uh qu requirements um they really just need to be able to pump out content fast and send and have it be designed really well but then you have things like Squarespace or like there's this other one that I think it was like y build or something like that um or Wix or all those other platforms and the reason that you choose those aren't because they're objectively better or because they they solve a a

10:09Sol like they solve a problem that you don't have a solution to you have multiple solutions to it you just it's going to be one that's like partial to you so the granularity of like how can I Niche down maybe even further and that way acquire more of the market I think that that's what is like what we're going to be seeing now even more more like I've always thought of this idea of like what if there was a accounting software specifically for tattoo shops you know cuz like tattoo shops have very specific things that they always keep track of um or even like guitar guitar shops or just you know things that like we made this specifically for you and yeah there's not as many people in that market but if we're going to try and

10:53acquire more market share and become something that's Irreplaceable we're going to have to rely on those more subjective features as opposed to something that's objectively better across multiple markets okay so what I'd like to do is for each of these three like give like a hey if you're facing this like here's a little nugget or something like maybe we try this this move like if you're one of these 50 B2B SAS CMOS which and you're listen to this that would be awesome no I'm just kidding um or if you're anyone experiencing any of these issues like what can we give them a like at least a little bit of that that prescription or that remedy of like okay what would you do what's a little practical step that they could take to

11:38move through and deal with something like increasing customer acquisition costs may I create a spring word for this that Cory can riff off of go for it so one of the things that we talk about very frequently is that ads aren't really the problem anymore it's going to be where are people going after the ads this is this might not necessarily be the case for these larger companies although we've seen some pretty egregious landing pages from very very well-funded and um yeah profitable profitable companies um but it seems to be that the the ads aren't necessarily the problem and a lot of people put so much money into that top of the funnel but they neglect the middle of the funnel specifically their

12:20landing page what do you think about that Cory yeah oh that's that's totally it like um I think that a lot of people have become complacent with putting money in certain places and then expecting everything else to kind of fall into place as far as conversion rates and okay now the people know that we exist now they should be able to sign up and it's like no not really like you have to you have to do a really good job of convincing them these days so just because you got them to your Ling page doesn't mean that they're going to then sign up we saw this a lot with um the Advent of free trials and this is how marketing goes to it's everybody's always looking for a Competitive Edge right so um you know back in the day

13:05even with SAS it was like go sign up today start paying us $1,000 a year and then you can get up and R with our software and that created a decent amount of friction right so anybody who wanted to disrupt that company or kind of steal their lunch then started offering something like a free trial and a l people with a free trial started offering fremium and then everybody with fremium started offering like these concierge migration packages and yeah different offers and um incentives and buying out their competitors's contracts and the friction keeps going uh lower and lower and lower and that's all because the optimizations can't be made in the app ad platforms very much and you can't really spend your way out of

13:47these problems um you really have to take a good hard look at the full funnel all the way from the beginning of the customer Journey to the End um and in practic Bally I think that a lot of companies have to think about cutting trimming the fat out of their marketing a lot of companies already have but the point I wanted to make was that sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the meat and the fat sometimes people are cutting actually the good parts of their programs that are profitable and uh and they really need to be cutting the things that aren't moving the needle at all um and I can't say what's what for any company right but I'm just saying that that can be hard to distinguish and you have to make

14:30sure that you're cutting the right things yeah it's fascinating um should we let's go on to number two I think it was great did you have something else Corey just one more thought this is more just like a question I don't know but one of the other things it makes me think of is like what's the relationship between Rising customer acquisition costs and economic inflation um because we saw a lot of inflation in the last 5 years since Co I would just assume that costs are going to go up for your cost per click for your vendors for your services you know SAS providers uh do a price increase um you know the dollar isn't a dollar anymore right and I think that that kind of Cascades down to everything

15:16so but I don't know what that relationship is so and maybe it's kind of a non-factor because that's always been something people have to account for I don't know but I just thinking out loud the economic impactor there isn't really a whole lot of industries that it doesn't like touch or like doesn't mess with the uh the like transfer of of uh goods or services like so it's going to touch a little bit or it's going to at least snake its way into like oh well now we should probably raise our price or else we can't you know cover these other costs of PPC or whatever it's interesting right yeah I guess the only the other point just on that is like I don't know if we'll ever see a survey response that's like oh customer

15:56acquisition costs are going down like cool like they're probably always going to go up yeah they just might go up slower yeah right gosh I can't imagine what it's going to be like in five years check back with the thing really bad yeah keep listening we'll see you in five years Cel this uh yeah well let's do number two which is um pipeline development challenges um so kind of what he was saying is um CMOS are seeing their tried andrue pipeline playbooks Fall Apart uh The budget's Limited it's not clear that even a bigger a bigger budget would even help um so I guess I want to get like your take this is kind of like the next step right after like okay it's cost so much more to even you know get the leads that we need or get

16:45the uh the new customers uh but in the middle there you have a pipeline of like who's coming in where are they going how are they getting to the very end um and it's hard to see that development I guess uh so kind of wanted to see what your guys thoughts were on I know gave some of those quotes and things too well I'm going to assume that this is more on like an Enterprise Level side CU you wouldn't necessarily I feel like you wouldn't classify people as leads you can but I feel like they're I would just treat them differently if it's like a smaller um self-served product versus it's the same concept though because I mean a A fremium or like a product Le uh produ Le growth business is going to

17:27have a pip plane this same way because they're going to have like this massive free user base and then they're going to have these kind of like leads yeah yeah then but then they're going to have another category of those free users that are like leads in the sense that they're showing the positive indicators of potentially becoming a paying user one day and or a lot of people will look and see you know oh is there any logo that I recognize then I can go like do outbound sales to these free users um so on and so forth so like pipeline I think can also accurately describe Enterprise and plg companies sorry my daughter just walked in she just went out sorry sorry okay Zach were you gonna say something no that that makes sense um I

18:13I think that the I mean when they say that their tried and true Playbook is falling apart I guess it's like well why like what yeah what causes something like that has worked for so long to fall apart and maybe it's a I maybe they aren't thinking through the need to innovate a little bit further and like maybe they're just it sounds like it could be something like a product problem where maybe they're not gating the right things and right sorry I was going to add to what you said because um in the like in the initial in the beginning um of the of his post says we're spending more to get worse customers and in my brain uh the pipeline is also like the the most value one of the most valuable pieces of it is

19:04like the determination of like what makes a customer a good customer and like the good customers get to the end is kind of the the goal of like okay the pipeline you know it's it's ultim going to bring these customers in but it's also like making sure that the good ones are like seeing the value and ready to click the button at the very end when they get to the bottom of the of the funnel you know um so maybe it's related to like what types of leads or potential customers get into the pipeline and that they're all not that good um maybe that's what it was pointing at but I could be way off no I think there's something there for sure I've I've heard of a lot of sales reps that'll tell me like it's rare these days that there's

19:44just a lead that comes to the door and it feels like you're playing t-ball it feels like every lead that comes through like they're throwing fast balls at you and you're striking out over and over and over again in other words the leads are making your life harder so the pipeline isn't full of people like when can I start it's like they have a entire sheet in front of them where they're interrogating you and you have to pass all these tests and jump through all these hoops in order to keep going further and further down the sales cycle um so you have to prove a lot more and that's kind of my suspicion about what people mean when they say that their tried andrue playbooks are are falling apart there was like when I started in

20:25marketing we were kind of right in the middle of this shift from like a like spray and prey blasting out direct uh you know cold Outreach over email and that was like the tried andrue Playbook and you had sdrs and AES and then you had all this whole process of trying to get leads through and you're you know following up with anybody who downloads an ebook or a white paper and you're nurturing those leads until they finally give you permission to hop on a call things like that right that to me just feels like a very very very outdated obsolete model that a lot of larger older companies are still trying to rely on and so there's not much juice left in the lemon and they're still there like why aren is why is in the juice coming

21:16out um and to me it's just a sign of like dude you gotta you got to change things up you got to shift you got to like abandon the Playbook you know what I mean like if this isn't working very well stop Staffing up so many sales people on the Enterprise side of things and start Staffing up more Engineers more marketers more copywriters more I don't know customer success onboarding people like where what is the gap that you can fill where you need to like reallocate those resources yeah actually I feel like that might be a good segue to number three which is the need for differentiation and brand in marketing because if the current Playbook is dying well what are some of the things could do that would separate you and

22:01distinguish you from everybody else so that regardless of what you're like who comes in the door they're excited to work with you because of some external factor that isn't necessarily a part of the product but it's it's more about who you are and that they want to work with you um what do you think of that I was going to say I think number three is like it's kind of like the remedy for number two also because I know I mentioned we would like okay let's solve all these but I think uh number three will definitely help um okay here's my like high level overview of what like all there's you know there used to be you know three big players in a space and now there's 25 or 50 or 100 um I feel like it's it feels

22:47to me that there was it used to be that you know there was four or five degrees of separation between these people all these businesses all in the same uh industry or Niche and now there's like 0.1 degree of separation it's like they're all like we're exactly like this company but we we also have this one subfeature it's a little different and our color scheme is blue like you know it's like let me give you a new color you know that kind of thing and I feel like that uh it's just because of like competition and like there's so many people like how do you differentiate when all the feels like all the ideas are are Zapped up but Cory I think you were going to say something sure yeah I mean when people

23:30say that they feel the need to differentiate um what they're saying is potential customers are telling me they don't understand why they they should choose me over my competitors um and so that's like a that's like a symptom right no one feels like they need to differentiate until people are like wait why should I choose you you sound exactly like these guys over here and those guys over here and like the thing that I have right now that I'm already paying for so it's true in the in the sense that like yeah you absolutely need Crystal Clear positioning copywriting messaging you have to have like an angle you have to have uh differentiators that go just beyond just features and also go into service and price and uh your brand as a

24:19whole and uh kind of like what you're representing it it's it's the service in in general right software as a service so what are all the ingredients of that service all those points of your service need to be differentiated um but it yeah again it's also like I think this is what happens in mature markets people need to Niche down but they're scared to they're scared to uh plant their flag somewhere and be like this is the hill that we're going to die on because they then they feel like then they're limiting themselves and they're going to be missing out on future opportunities but then they're just uh their signals getting lost in the noise I think there is there's more of a surface level component to it as well uh because I

25:03mean we' talked we talked about last week about the or two weeks ago about being copy first versus design first and one of the things that came up was the Trope of homogeneity between all these startups and the way they talk the way that like the personas around these companies all feel very very very similar especially if you are in a similar Market I feel like you know all of the um like the tight face dour of you know those like uh very goofy humanist uh type faces that are kind of extended and have like the the cuts the ink wells in their um their letters it's like yeah yeah I've seen this before you're get it you're trying to be human and show that you're not like you know some software company in your high tower

25:50um but they the thing that sucks about that is that the thing that would help differentiate them the most is if they stop trying to be what they think people want them to be and if they took a look at well how do we actually communicate internally and present an authentic version of ourselves both in the way we speak and then the way that we present the like our image as a company and that leads to a lot more cool marketing initiatives like um you know Loops doing Cal boxes and marketing as Cal you know like that that's super cool um or uh I mean you could think of it's about doing things that are almost more artistic as opposed to like yeah this is for sure going to bring us in a bunch of money

26:33instead of doing things are just like that's cool like why not do that like that sounds like something that's kind of fun there it's interesting there's a pretty clear dynamic or parallel between Hollywood as well it's like when you start making movies to make money they're not going to be good movies uh so you have to bring forth that artistic effort or at least be willing to experiment with it and be okay with the fact that it might not work right away way but it's going to be a long-term play that we're going to help differentiate ourselves and show that we are actually different like look at the can anybody else say that they act this way I don't think so yeah I think that gets to the point

27:12that like positioning and differentiation is super philosophical to a company it's very it's very existential to a company's existence why should I exist what do I have to offer that is unique you know what I mean why why do I deserve to live I mean created me I mean it's the last it's the last question that I ask during the brand strategy stuff it's like well why do you exist like you know what what do like what is the driving force behind you um but then the thing that people fail to recognize about that is that it has trickled down to the way that you build your product and the way that you present your product it comes down to the features like a good example is um like anybody that has like a

27:59a sustainability approach they're going to say things like well we give 1% of all of our profits to uh you know 1% for the 1% for the planet or some other kind of Charity that they actually care about and what that does is it not only puts proof like proof of stake of like no we actually believe this here is tangible proof but anybody else that also thinks the same way is going to feel more emotionally connected to you and those emotional connections are a lot harder to break and they're a lot harder to replicate whereas anything that has to do with like your prefontal prefrontal cortex of like will this company cost this much they have these features they have XYZ now you're moving people into

28:41this comparison around where they're having to think too much but instead if they loved you it'd be very hard for them to even think and consider moving away from somebody else mhm yeah yeah that that's funny because you said that you end your position or your branding workshop with that question and I always start the positioning workshop with that question or basically with a with a preface and I tell them hey this is going to be uncomfortable and I'm going to ask a lot of questions they're going to make you like they're basically going to challenge you like why do you exist and what problems does this does your product solve and how does it do it uniquely and that is hard because so many software companies start as like a

29:24lab experiment they're like hm I wonder if this approach to solving this problem works even just a little bit and then it does and they keep refining the uh the experiment so to speak and they keep building on their product and taking a very MV MVP approach following the data and it works you know companies get to millions of dollars in ARR and then they sort of have this like Frankenstein understanding of why customers choose them they're like well some choose us for this reason over here some choose us for that reason I think that we do this really well and maybe everyone has a different opinion I remember experiencing this like firsthand being a marketer talking to our sales team at a past company and

30:10trying to lead them through a similar type of Workshop where we're trying to gather a bunch of information from the front lines about like hey why our customer what what are the reasons customers are telling you that they're willing to sign the contract and become a client or a customer of ours and everybody had different answers which is is so funny because there should be like a couple of really really clear similar answers but it just goes to show that everybody interprets things differently and so you have to be able to take a really deep look into yourself as a company and plant your FL your flag somewhere but then you also have to get rid of a lot of other stuff and say oh we're not going to focus on this segment

30:53we're not going to focus on that use case we're not going to try to compete up Market we're not going to try compete down Market um which is uncomfortable always but that is how you differentiate yeah you have to be everything for someone not not everything someone to everything what am I trying to say does that make sense I know what you're you have to be something to you have to be something to someone not everything to everyone yeah or something to everyone there we go that was it okay you need to be everything to someone not something to everyone like just we do it all like this is the AI this is the AI problem which is like you go on any their sites and it's like it can do anything like my

31:37dinner like what can't it do and it's and like the chat bot if you ask will be like sure yeah we could do that like just like everything is done what was the movie the movie T the everything everywhere all at once yeah that's oh yeah yeah yeah big problem The Who am every AI company's H1 [Laughter] Los a nick nick come back to us go yeah yeah can you hear me yeah did your power die okay my no my like my power uh like Jack down here like that is like underneath my uh desk like fell out and it all just turned off that is so funny okay well we can like trim it right that that exists yeah Michael that cut that bro cut it um what was I saying uh I was gonna say it makes me think of ioot that's basically it the

32:39like what have you seen ioot with Will Smith Rob what am I he's like and then he like runs away you know it's like that's the SAS is saying what am I as Sunny the robot from my robot and Will Smith's trying to catch them with his laser gun yeah it's it's crazy because it does come down to like having a having a motive besides money which is tough because I think that everybody like obviously you need the pragmatism of well our business has to be funded and that funding has got to come from somewhere we'd prefer if it came from customers um but having a I think having those values and also understanding yourself like what makes you feel the way that you want other people to feel is a really good source of inspiration

33:26cuz I mean that's my mant right is that the great Brands aren't created they're stolen what are they stolen from they're stolen from the things that excite you and when you can I feel I just feel like it makes it a lot easier to answer the question of like who do we want to be it's actually there's a psychological term for it I forget exactly what it is but you actually don't know your own identity you only see it as a result of I like the way that person acts or the way this person behaves and I want to Adorn part of that on myself that's why when somebody says something like you know oh Cory you know you're so much like Nick in this capacity then then you have an understanding of how you act

34:07because you can't actually see it yourself it's like the pickle and the jar syndrome you can't read your own label but you can only see outside and other people read yours um so if you want to steal your brand just think of the things that make you feel the way you want other people to feel preferably not other software companies and think about the things that they do the way they act and the mechanisms that make you feel that way is it the colors is it the way they speak is it the actions they take is it the the beliefs that they have like and your inspiration can come from anywhere um my my Soap Box rant which is done now over and I down um I go ahead go no no go you good okay my turn yeah um I was going to say I am

34:56really glad that this is Point number three and that uh this is one of the three biggest problems that software companies have because it's like the two like two of the most important things that we do is that Corey you have your positioning workshop and all this like positioning and Market differentiation type knowledge and Zach's like intense with branding and like how to make this exactly like what your like what your belief system and everything that like started this business like turns into a beautiful brand that like really sets you apart so I'm very glad that this is a major problem for everyone so thank you guys for having this issue so we can fix it up okay sorry Cory what were you

35:36going to say no I I kind of have a a hot take a little bit that it's funny that marketers and CMOS are saying that they need brand and marketing differentiation because I also feel like it's not just the marketers job to figure out the differentiation and the positioning strategy I think as a marketer your job becomes a lot easier when your product team is really really opinionated and in tune with your customers and I I'm not like trying to crap on product people or CTO or anything like that but Engineers have a tendency to be like oh yeah we could be used for this and we could also be used for that and like the software can do anything because they're purely thinking logically about like they they know the

36:22software so in depth they almost think too highly of it they're like oh yeah you know we have a a wizzywig that can be used as like a website builder Andor an app builder and it's like no just choose one which one should we do and so if the product team were to be a lot more opinionated about no we think that we can do this best and they know they competitors and they can choose that direction for their road map and then the marketers can turn that those opinions into your messaging and into your positioning strategy and then roll that out to your sales team it becomes a lot easier because then otherwise you're fighting with your product Team all the time if I really hate as a marketer and doing our workshops with our clients

37:08being like hey we should plant our flag here and ignore all these other things over there because now I'm telling them that like you can't have those things and you're wrong about wanting those things I want them to be like no I really want this one thing and I really want to do this one thing really really well I'm like great we can help you do that let's go turn that into the messages that are going to convert so uh anyways that's my hot take about like if if marketers want better differentiation they need their their cpos and their CTO to have better differentiation it is it a hot take if it's completely correct it's who he's placing the blame on correct it's who he's placing the blame on yeah yeah no one wants to point

37:59fingers but we're just pointing fingers at everyone else so you go um gentlemen any final thoughts no um it's solved well I think my my final takeaway which I want to emphasize is to embrace a little bit more Artistry you know like if the things that you are used to to doing aren't working anymore it's going to hurt a little bit and you're probably going to regress a little when you're trying to be up these new Ventures but that's okay because part of this process and change is Art it's chaos like you don't know what's going to happen but you do know what's going to happen if you try and stick with a status quo and keep doing what you've been doing which is not working so give yourself some permission

38:45to experiment and fail a little bit in the hopes that you'll actually come up with something new because like if you're going to innovate you were going to create mess and that's what this problem is it's an innovation problem it's not an efficiency problem it's an innovation problem and the lack of willing to take risk to try and do something different yeah yeah you know I was just thinking this might be contrary to everything that I've said previously um but it's okay cuz these will all be different clips so no no one will be able to tell um the the thing I was thinking about was sometimes when you try to uh so for example if you're if you're like oh I we're not getting as many customers so we should ramp down

39:29our marketing we should do less marketing because it's not as efficient as we want it to and sometimes that's actually not the right answer sometimes you have to turn the dial up and do more things in order to like for things to level out again essentially um you know swing harder make bigger bets do stranger more Creative Marketing studs do the artistic um chaotic things like like like Zach was mention I don't know if you can really like effectively decrease your customer acquisition costs super well like I said you can trim the fat if there's like things that obviously aren't working just reallocate the budget but if you're like Hey we're getting less worse customers so we should turn our marketing down then

40:20you're going to get even less worse customers you know what I mean you need to do better marketing and sometimes that means spending more for a while to get out of that same thing with the pipeline development if it's like man uh it's really hard to get these leads to convert into customers and everyone keeps you know moving or keeps uh dropping off at the certain stage of the onboarding cycle or the sales cycle for whatever reason that doesn't mean necessarily that you need to like uh qualify them more or make it harder for them to move through the sales cycle sometimes that means that you need to make it even easier and even less qualified people to come through um because maybe they're not coming the

41:04right people aren't coming through the door in the first place because it's so um timec consuming to do so or whatever the reason might be right yeah it sounds a lot like if I had to put a a label on all these it's doing a little bit of things that don't scale yeah big problem like you know because experiments don't scale very well at first um trying new things doesn't scale very well at first Maybe going and talking to your customer base doesn't scale very well at first but it yields compounding benefit down the road and it it's like just you're gonna have to work a little bit to make it happen I like what you said turn the heat up that makes me think of like a big pot like okay they have this big

41:44marketing pot that they put all these ingredients in and like all this stuff and like it all kind of boiled down to like okay this is how we do it we pay for this and we do this organic and you know like that is the machine that runs and now it's it's kind of like okay it's dried up like don't turn the like turn it up again and add a ton more ingredients in and like put more water in and like boil it boil it boil it and it's going to like you know you need to like re re orchestrate this whole like boil or cook that you made and get more ingredients more things to test out again what's going to boil down to the bottom and actually be the thing that carries your your business forward and refills your pipeline and and lowers all

42:22that stuff that's really interesting I like that you said turn the heat up and like turn this little analogy in my brain on um but super good um okay thank you for your final thoughts I thought that was great I really liked going through all this content uh today and who knows what we'll go through next time you'll have to stay tuned and find out um anything else gentlemen good happy with everything you said I think we're great yeah no Tak Backes felt felt cute felt cute might delete later we'll see okay well thanks for listening to the factory floor and we will see you guys next time [Music]