The Revolution of Marketing-as-a-Service with Domenic Colasante, CEO at 2X

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Domenic, CEO at 2X, about the philosophy behind marketing-as-a-service. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:15) It's Domenic.

(Domenic at 00:00:16) Hey, Joel. We have a logo on the back here. You're branded. You're ready to go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:21) I wouldn't have it any other way, my friend. I did want to say that I'm super excited because David is such a great human being. And I know we got connected through him. And so I was curious, how did you meet David?

(Domenic at 00:00:33) Yeah. So I took private equity money in March. Very important moment in our history. It was a milestone to move from being founder and sort of self-funded with our initial team of founders onto, you know, jet fuel. And we took a partnership with Recognize, particularly Mike Grady at Recognize. And Mike was on the board at ThreePillar and introduced me to David. And as we were thinking about how to build a diverse board of, you know, not just financial professionals and category experts, but just successful CEOs that had done it, I got introduced to him as part of that. And I totally agree. Fell in love with his philosophy on how to CEO. And I said, I want to learn how to be a better CEO from that person and how to lead a better team and achieve better things in my company. And he felt the same way. So it was great. It was a match. And he's been really, really great, great resource to have. And I'm privileged he wanted to work with us. And he loves our story. He thinks our business model is transformational and in some similar ways what he was doing, kind of category creation. But it was such an awesome connection to make.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:46) And so what category did you create?

(Domenic at 00:01:49) Marketing-as-a-service. It's sort of a new way to think of how to run the marketing department with third-party services and sort of not agency-related necessarily, but real dedicated, intentional, managed services on running the day-to-day work inside of marketing. And so a lot of agencies might come in and do a project at a point in time, like a new website or a new brand or a new launch of something. But then the marketing team does all the day-to-day work. And I think our category is more about how do we bring in third-party expertise and run work to make that day-to-day work even more effective, so that the internal team can do the things that only they can do, like product, like strategy, like brand messaging, alignment with customer priorities and sales priorities. And then when it comes to all the blocking and tackling and day-to-day work, bring in an expert third party to do that. And so that kind of shift, which has occurred in most functions of business, not in B2B marketing yet. So a lot of those areas, I think really, as you guys are doing on the podcast space, like bringing experts in to handle pieces, I think is a newer concept for marketing when it comes to run work. Marketers are really good at outsourcing projects, but they're not so good at bringing in partners to help run big chunks of the organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:07) Yeah. I see it, you know, my background was software engineering and I saw it happening there in different words with how frameworks emerged and people stopped rewriting stuff and just started using the common, you know, pre-built things. And I watched the emergence of that, and now I'm, you know, owning my business. We're much smaller than you. We're about 20 people. But it's really clear that you need the person that owns it and the person that deeply, deeply understands it, and then a bunch of work will emerge around that individual. And then it becomes the question of to support the work that needs to be done around that. I call them magic people. But around the magic person, do you hire that infrastructure or do you leverage a partner to help with that? And that's always the big question. So that's what you guys are for marketing then.

(Domenic at 00:03:53) That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Providing the arms, legs, brains to execute and do work all day. It's the thing that the world needs right now. I think a lot of marketing departments are under difficult times as marketing budgets can become, you know, the smallest they've been in recent memory, and a lot of austerity around attention on cost and those kind of things. But now's the time you need more revenue and now's the time you need more marketing. And so being able to provide a model that can bring that and also bring it with offshore economics so it actually can cost less to get more was really the problem that every CMO is facing. That's sort of the lane that we're in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:30) How did you develop those relationships across countries and continents?

(Domenic at 00:04:35) I was a CMO who had this problem. And I went on a journey to find a solution to it and was introduced to someone in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, through a friend of a friend of a friend. And was really just blown away by the quality and caliber of talent that is in other places. I mean, we just think as marketers, and it's wrong, we think that, well, we're the best people in the world to do this because we're US-based, in headquarters, you know, close to the business. And when it comes to the thing of, from my first experience with someone in Kuala Lumpur, was we're talking about testing and optimization and how to deliver a dynamic web experience. So I was like, every marketer I know is talking about this. Like, you guys are doing it. Like, you're actually building these scenarios and tests and real-time serving dynamic content and seeing what works better and looking at that and then driving that into, if that's a great web experience, that would be a great social media, that would be great advertising, that would be great email. Like unifying that. This is really cool stuff. And I just found that there were amazingly talented people in those markets that had IP and had capability that we didn't have and decided to build a whole business around that. And really, of the first 10 employees we hired back in 2017, I think eight or nine of them are still here. And so we've been able to really build a special thing where it's not just an offshore team. It's some of the best marketers in the world, you know, coming in to help large companies, small companies, private equity-funded companies, tech companies, all companies in B2B in my space, but at least lots of different kinds of companies really achieve different levels of marketing results and breakthrough to that next level of impact and performance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:18) And you're at several hundred people now. Correct?

(Domenic at 00:06:21) 600. Yeah. Over five years. It's been a big journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:26) And you just took your first round of funding recently, or did you have other smaller ones?

(Domenic at 00:06:31) No. No. We self-funded it out of the gate, and then, so we made it this far on our own. And we frankly didn't need funding. The business has been doing really well, but I really felt that we tapped into something that the world needs, and we wanted to build, you know, more enterprise-grade offering.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:49) That is not normal. That's not a normal growth rate.

(Domenic at 00:06:54) And we didn't do any of the marketing for ourself. It was a lot of, like, inbounds, customer referrals, CMOs telling other CMOs, private equity firms bringing us in and taking us across the portfolio. And so the market kind of just responded and said, yes. And so we're like, great. Now how do we lean into this? Like, how do we build even more capabilities in the service? How do we eliminate the friction? How do we bring in some really high-powered talent? And how do we manage, you know, a service firm that's growing at 100% per year for five years? There's some best practices. And thankfully, Recognize and their network, Frank in particular having built, you know, Cognizant and some of the biggest service firms in the world. That kind of playbook, I thought would be really useful to us and will help us not innovate on things that have already been done. Like, let's take the best practices for doing this and deploy it in our world and they go faster.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:42) Yeah. It's amazing. I'm 35 currently, but it's over the past, you know, 15 years, I've noticed that I went from wanting to do everything uniquely with my own spin on it to just take the thing that we know works and just focus on that 20% that makes, you know, the difference.

(Domenic at 00:07:57) Yeah. It's tough because people that are really successful entrepreneurial like to innovate on everything. That's part of our, that's what makes, that's our skill that makes us really good. And as you reach a point of scale, you've got to find out the balance of what are the things that must be innovated upon because we have to be unique and different. Or where is the innovation really applying, knowing which of the standardized practices to bring in and where to innovate. And so really thinking about, you know, where does it make sense to just adopt what works? That is in and of itself, I think, a form of innovation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:28) And then do you guys have a podcast?

(Domenic at 00:08:30) We do not. No. We do not yet. It's on the list of to-dos. I enjoy talking to folks in the market. There's some people I really respect who are doing it already. We do that on our own, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:41) What's your favorite marketing podcast?

(Domenic at 00:08:43) I like Matt Heinz, Sales Pipeline Radio. He's my go-to. He speaks our language and definitely understands the ABM-driven B2B marketing transformation opportunity in front of everyone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:59) Did he come, oh my goodness. This is crazy. I did some work with him, like, 15 years ago in real estate. I was like, I Googled him real quick. I was like, is that the same Matt Heinz? Wow. He was in real estate. Like, when I saw his face, I was like, I know that guy. Yeah. Yeah. That is...

(Domenic at 00:09:18) He's still around. He's still kicking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:19) He's doing a podcast now? Come on.

(Domenic at 00:09:22) He's, you gotta reconnect. You gotta send him a note to reconnect. He's still kind of staying in the loop. He does.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:30) He also has had the same headshot for, like, 15 years or at least 10.

(Domenic at 00:09:34) He still looks like that. He's allowed. You know? You know, some people have, like, you know, changed there. He's still the same, you know, physical appearance and a lot taller in person, I would say, as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:44) Oh, that's so great. Small world. Josh, can you make a note of that? Because, you know, I didn't, he has a memorable last name because the first time I ever met him was like, oh, the ketchup company or something? Like, you know?

(Domenic at 00:09:55) I gotta send you, he wrote this blog about all the funny experiences in his life about getting, like, complaints from people who had problems with ketchup and some school teacher who wanted the Heinz ketchup costume for her school classroom. And you've got to find it. He's got this whole article about all the Heinz, you know, things in his life, which is really funny.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:16) Yeah. That is, I just pulled up his LinkedIn. Yeah. That's funny because he says Heinz Marketing 14 years, nine months ago. And when I connected with him back in my life, I was like, oh, yeah. I ran into him. Oh, yep. Look, he used to be at HouseValues. Senior Director Marketing at HouseValues.

(Domenic at 00:10:30) That's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:31) There you go. Small world. How many people do we know?

(Domenic at 00:10:35) I don't know. Yeah. That's my go-to. And he's sort of become like if you're, like, a B2B CMO, like, he's the guy you listen to. I think he's really got attention, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:46) So great. Yeah. I gotta say hey. We gotta get on there and help cross-promote our podcast production services. Yeah. That's what we gotta do.

(Domenic at 00:10:52) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people want to build, and that's part of, like, I have, like, friends that have them. So, like, I'll just join yours versus the drone is a lot of, you know, a lot of work, but important work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:08) Yeah. And I'm actually curious to have a conversation, we'll edit around this, but I'm curious to have conversations with you about how you do your relationships with other countries in a way that it's a high-quality situation and not a low-quality situation. And if there might be some opportunity there. But back to you and your company. So help me understand this. This is something that's not entirely clear for me right now. I understand that you do the work and you help, like, the key people. You can pair into their teams and help them do this, be the arms and legs and whatnot. But do you also have the magic people at your company if we don't have them? Can we come to you and say, like, hey, we need strategy. We have a really great widget maker. We really know the widget and the problems that it solves, and we don't really know a whole lot about marketing at all. Can you just plug an entire team in with all the areas of expertise?

(Domenic at 00:11:59) We can. And that's part of what we built. The first thing I built after we took private equity investment was a strategy practice, a consulting practice. Hired some amazing people in that who have been B2B marketing strategists their whole career, who really understand how to solve sticky problems, whether it's an assessment, a diagnostic, a strategy, a plan, a provocative set of recommendations to move you to a different state, or an interim assignment. We do now have a practice as of this year to be able to do that work. And it's so important because sometimes, I mean, it's two different problems. Either I don't know what to do or I know what to do, I don't have anyone to do it. We can solve either of those. And I think in the world of every marketer is in some form of transformation right now, you need to be able to do both.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:45) And so you do these two things really, really well, and you just do that over and over and over and make the experience better and better and better. And that's how you went, you know, to five, six hundred, seven hundred employees in the past couple years.

(Domenic at 00:12:57) Yeah. Yeah. I think it's solving a real need. I think it's, I mean, there's a lot of things that we're seeing that tie in, I think, exactly to, you know, your community. Marketers have spent so much money on technology and very few are fully utilizing it. Lots of reports coming out of that. Gartner, I think recently it was 42% of the MarTech that marketers have invested in, the functionality is being used. 42% of it is being used, which is interesting. It's actually frankly higher than I would have thought. But it was 58% like two years ago. And so there's this huge void of marketing tech skills and capabilities that I think is a problem getting worse on its own as marketers are running around, you know, with these big appetite objectives, priorities around how do I bring in all these new data tools and intent tools and account-based marketing and automation and AI and on and on. And so the market conditions that need what we do are naturally just growing and growing and growing. And I think we've really built a solution on that and really have built a model where we want customers to be really successful and so successful they keep us forever. They tell all their friends about us. As CMOs move on, which tends to happen more than most positions, you know, they bring us to the next company and we stay where we were and then they go to the next company with them. And then that kind of model has been really, we built the business around, let's do great work. Let's worry about that. Let's not worry about, you know, putting our brand everywhere in the world and, you know, building this hype around us.

(Dominic at 00:14:30) Let's make it about making the customer successful, the CMO successful, the marketer successful, and helping them really deliver things that they know they want to do, but they just don't have the people to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:39) Yeah. That's something we found out early on is to look at the key contact, the individual that's the stakeholder as the customer, and how do we make them look good. And even to our point of our onboarding process, understanding what they get judged on and what they have reporting on so that we can be even thinking about it because we want to make them look good. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:02) And then when they go to other companies, they don't even have a question. We've had—those are my favorite deals—is when we get someone that comes from another company, they're just like, "Hey, we need a show." And I'm like, "Alright."

(Dominic at 00:15:11) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:12) Because I know we can deliver, and it's the beauty of the relationships. So yeah. Hey, I had a couple other questions for you about those numbers that you just mentioned. Like, why did it change? Did they start building more features, or is it like, how did that number go in the opposite direction?

(Dominic at 00:15:31) Well, I think one, marketers are buying more tech. And so the more tech they buy, the less percentage of tech they're able to manage, which is an interesting reality. Secondly, I think when tech strategy is built and tech decisions are made in marketing, the marketer is a technology leader who does not have a technology background. And so a lot of times, I think marketers are doing exactly the right thing. They're understanding the power of a new platform. They're deciding that can bring huge value to their organization. They buy the platforms. They want to bring it into their environment. But they missed a part of, well, how are we going to do the human side around it? Who's going to use it? How are we going to train people? How are we going to certify people? How are we going to bring it into the DNA of our organization? They don't always have that as part of the plan. And I think a lot of tech vendors have amazing platforms but also don't always share that what they're selling is transformation, and the technology is an enabler of that. But in order to get the transformation, in order to get a better marketing engine that's more automated, that's finding people before they even know they want to be found, in order to do that, you need a lot of tech, you need a lot of people, you need process—the standard things that a technologist knows. And so I think there's a bit of a collision. And then I also think there's issues where the tech adoption is going so fast and there's no one really creating talent to manage the tech. We did some work with 6sense in particular, one of the marketing tech solutions I think is most exciting in the space. We did some research with them. We looked at people that have a certification for that platform. How many of them are there on LinkedIn? Easy way to get a real-time view of supply. And then how many job descriptions are posted that want that technology skill? What you find is these huge imbalances. Old stuff like email, trade shows, content, SEO, SEM, websites—tons of supply, 10 to one in how many people have the capability versus how many jobs are posted. New things? You get like twice as many job postings as there are people in the market, who by the way are already employed, who have jobs. And so I think everyone's fighting over these 500,000 people that are certified, whether it's 6sense, whether it's Marketo, whether it's Salesforce, whether it's HubSpot, whether it's Drift, whether it's these other platforms. There's not enough certified talent in the market. And so as employers, marketing leaders are trying to find that talent, they're fighting over a very small group. And very few companies are working on, well, how will we build that talent? You don't learn it in school. You're not coming out with that. And it's one of these things where sometimes you need experience to get experience. So there's sort of this scarcity of talent in that space that someone's got to solve. And I think service providers are perfect to solve that. But there aren't a lot of managed service marketing tech service providers out there that are working on B2B specifically. And so it almost just creates this perfect storm of the shortage, which I think is driving in the end lower outcomes from technology. And I think it's totally solvable. It's like you either have to decide I'm going to create these people or I'm going to find a vendor that's going to bring these people in, but I'm going to require that if I just spent a whole bunch of money on this new technology platform and this new vision, I want to have people that really know how to use it. And if I don't have that, I'm not going to buy the tech or I'm going to change my roadmap or I'm going to commit to have the human component with the tech component working together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:04) And so do you work with 6sense? So if a customer of theirs needs extra manpower around their technology, they refer you?

(Dominic at 00:19:12) We do. And vice versa. A customer of ours that has a lot of great ideas and wants to achieve the next level of marketing impact, we refer them. And it's a very symbiotic relationship. And so having those tech partnerships has been a really cool part. And we're not resellers to the extent that we're pushing it. It's more of a, we're servicing the best stuff in the market because we think marketers should use it. And there's an opportunity to get so much more value out of what you've already bought usually. And that's how you do more with less. Like you already have this beautiful tech stack. You've already built this amazing thing that marketers stand on stage with their marketing tech stacks and you win awards for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:48) Marketing tech stacks.

(Dominic at 00:19:49) Yeah, yeah. And they win awards for buying the right solutions and integrating them together. But how do we make sure we get 100% of the functionality out of them, not 42%?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:03) That is so cool. And so what are you talking about as far as with your colleagues? Like, what are the big things happening right now in marketing that you guys see as the next big thing?

(Dominic at 00:20:14) There's a real shift in the buyer journey that—I think it was going this way anyway, it was accelerated by digital work—but buyers, they don't want to talk to sales anymore. They want to get through their whole journey on their own. They want to do all their own research. They want to understand all their own alternatives and what could be better for them independently. And then they don't want to fill out a form. They don't want you to know who they are. They want to do it anonymously and on their own. And that problem has created this massive amount of buyers that are in market but are totally unknown to most vendors. In the past, you would register for a webinar or a white paper. You would reach out to a salesperson for a demo kind of in the beginning of your evaluation cycle. Now those things happen at the very end after someone's already made up their mind. And so how do you identify who's going through that dark funnel, who's really on a quest to solve a problem? And how do you make sure that somewhere in that journey, they find you and they're knocking on your door? A lot of tech is out there to help provide visibility to that. And so by looking at search trends and behavior and intent data and buyer activity, you can start to see, particularly at a company level, what companies are looking for what products. And then you can start to market to them. We all see this in our personal life where you get those ads on social media that just happen to be exactly the right time. Well, applying that to B2B, into our professional lives, I think that's the real shift. And when that happens also, it totally changes the relationship between sales and marketing. And so it's not necessarily marketing's job to go get a lead and hand it to sales. It's marketing's job to activate that buyer and get them engaged with your brand and to bring them into some level of conversation that then brings a salesperson in. And so that shift in the balance of the sales funnel where it used to be like half marketing, half sales, and now it's like 80% marketing, 20% sales, I think has changed a lot of what marketing has to do. And I think has also changed a lot of priorities around what marketing does and how marketing reports impact and where marketing spends attention, how marketing and sales really work together on the revenue problem. That's the big conversation. A lot of AI plays into that, a lot of technology plays into that. There's a lot of workflow in that, but that's really the change that most marketing organizations in B2B at least are going through right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:31) I can say I fully agree. We had a sales call this morning. The guy showed up with a seven-page brief document of exactly what they wanted. He just said, "I'm just shopping. I heard through a friend of a friend that you guys were a great production company and here's what I want." He knew every question. I looked at him. I was like, "This is basically our kickoff call after you become a customer. This is what we figure out." And then he's like, "Yeah. I just want pricing." I was like, "Alright. Cool." So I just jumped right to pricing because I hate when people don't give me pricing when I want it. And I jumped directly to pricing, showed it to him, and he's like, "Great. Awesome." He's like, "We're doing a Q4. Send me over the proposal." And I said, "Awesome. Great."

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:12) And so you're exactly right. We're also—we've been working the past two weeks on a new iteration of our website. So us selling podcast is fairly new. For the first two years, I did the show as a hobby, then I started doing advertising. And that's one of the ways I met Three Pillar and all of them. And then we did advertising for three years, and then some of our sponsors started asking us, "Hey, we really enjoy sponsoring your show and coming on your show. Can you make us a show?" And at the time, we had done north of 500 episodes, and we're like, "Well, we know how to hire all these positions. We know how to—I'm a software engineer by trade, so we have everything really well organized. If we just follow all these processes, sure." So that was about a year and a half ago or so. We've picked up about 20 shows. But yeah, we've learned so much about how the buying process happens and how people want to receive information. And rather than looking at what competitors do and what their websites are, we look at what our clients need from us. And then we're designing our new website around those principles. So we'll see how that goes.

(Dominic at 00:24:16) Yeah, yeah. Speaking of podcasters, there's a—it was Chris Walker the other day just talked about—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:23) Oh, yeah.

(Dominic at 00:24:23) Stop following your competitors and start following your customers. That was really well said. If you're—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:26) Oh, nice.

(Dominic at 00:24:27) I'll steal it. His comment was—I think it was something to the effect that if you're following your competitors, by definition, you're behind them. And instead, your customers will tell you what they want. They'll tell you what they need. And I think that's dead on. I think it's, you know, if you want to be the one that they come to for information and the one that they learn about how to buy a podcast service, what questions to ask, you should be providing that content to the world and enable the customer. Your content should leave the customer better than you found them, even if all they ever do is view the content. And sort of that obsession of creating marketing materials that are actually helpful, that are not there to benefit you, that are there to benefit the customer, is really where I think that shift occurs and I totally agree with that philosophy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:16) And to build on top of what you said, my favorite hack is teaching people how to buy something. Because you look at the marketplace, everybody's, "We're the best. We're the best. We—" you know, A, B, and C, and here's our unique value add. And then you've got the person who says, "This is how you buy it. Here's how you learn how to buy it." And then you go to that person to learn how to evaluate the others. Well, that person owns a company that does it, and you learn everything, and usually those people are smart enough to where they have the highest quality offerings available. And so you learn about it all from them. You feel like you know them by the end of the day. Look, there have been people, Dominic, that come up to me when I'm at a conference or something and start just a fluid conversation like we've known each other for 20 years, talking about my kids, who I've never met in my life, but they've listened to 400 episodes. It's beautiful. I love it.

(Dominic at 00:26:05) Yeah. It's the unfair asymmetry of information though. So you're well known. And if, you know, that's the job of marketing, of founders, of CEOs, is to really activate the market and become known and leave those people better than they were.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:25) I want to run something by you since you're smart and you're out there. So as we go, I have a guess of where things are headed. So I'm not claiming it's right. I'm just saying I've got this small feeling that this is where we're headed in the next five years with content. So I think podcast, the fact that it's the wrapper of a podcast, is just the container. It's the box it's in. What's inside the box is what I'm calling relationship-based content. So I think that the future is relationship-based content. I don't know what platform we're going to be using. I don't know if it's going to be a podcast or a TikTok or some new thing or a YouTube. But what I have found is that the content I gravitate towards and spend hours a month just consuming passively in between periods of time is usually clips of long-form conversations with experts discussing the problems at the highest level. And I'm calling that relationship-based content. And so my thing that I believe is going to be really important for companies is to figure out how to get good at that. It's like websites. Right? At first, everyone's like, "Ah, it's just the new thing," or "It's just social media. It's just the new thing," but then it becomes the thing you have to do. But I think that we're early on that curve.

(Dominic at 00:27:45) Yeah. You know, it's funny because in the beginning of a lot of the interactive content, there was the talking head case study that everybody used to—I worked at SAP and I filmed so many of those. And then we calibrated all the way over into, "You know what? Let's just do animated, illustrated explainers." And then we went to them like, "Let's just get the B-roll." And then we went to, "Everyone's home anyway. So we can just do a recording from Zoom." And it became, "Let's just get AI to do it for us." Right? And now we've come to the spot where we're missing that authenticity and we're missing that human connection that people crave in the process because I can read all the stuff on my own. I can watch all the demos on my own. I can learn about the process. But I want to see somebody who's just like me explain to me that this is going to work, that this is going to help me solve the problem. And I want to hear about the what we tried that failed and worked and didn't work and what we learned and how the hero was better for the journey. You know, that kind of storytelling, I think is really hard to replicate in other formats.

(Dominic at 00:28:50) And I think it's really smart of you to call that a category of content. Again, I think that's the content that, you know, sure, you might be able to have some things that you can do to make it more efficient with the tools and the AI we have, but you really do need people. Buy from people. Companies don't buy anything. And how do you connect with those people on the other side of the table digitally to give them confidence that it's gonna make their problem go away or the job was successful or their dreams come true, whatever those things are? It's hard to do that in totally flat content without people involved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:26) I like that history line you gave me. I'm gonna send that to our sales team. We need to put that in a deck from the talking head case study to explain it because it ends up with the authenticity lacking at, and that comes after the AI explosion. And I've said, you know, for the past couple months that I also, on top of the relationship-based content, is one of the things I've been thinking about for two or three months. I've also been considering that I would put money on in-person events becoming far more significant than they are now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:57) I think the driving of AI and there will be this lack of trust of this well-polished, high-quality content. Anybody on the planet can click and have a button and it's generated. That's gonna put a premium on in-person relationships as along with relationships as a whole.

(Dominic at 00:30:16) Yeah. We've seen that. I mean, I've done some really interesting events over the last couple of years where, I mean, some of it was a bit of pent up, like, I wanna get back out and see people that I need to be, because now I'm hybrid and I'm not in an office all day or with my colleagues. And so that human connection is even more important for that reason.

(Dominic at 00:30:34) But I definitely think, yeah, as there's just more content out there, you need different formats and different people consume things in different ways. So some people like interactive and some people like to read, and some people like videos. People like shorts, but like long. And how do you have different content items, content formats, ways to get educated that kind of map to different learning styles and different journeys? And I think events are a really critical part of it.

(Dominic at 00:30:57) It's always been this argument of, you know, do we spend it all in digital, we spend it all in physical? And it was like the pendulum swings. Right? Before, it was all physical generally went out a lot. The answer, I think, is both. I think you need both in tandem.

(Dominic at 00:31:12) And ideally, you've got a whole bunch of digital activating people and getting everybody excited to know who you are and what you do and how you solve problems and building your thought leadership presence. And then when someone finally has an opportunity to meet in person, they've already heard about you. They've already consumed content. They've already been on your website. They've already, and then after you have a conversation and then people get busy and go back and the digital nurtures them.

(Dominic at 00:31:37) I think it's having that physical to digital hybrid concept in the journey of how buyers buy is also, I think, a really important best practice to bring in and not over-calibrate in either direction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:49) So I've got a specific question which you might not be able to answer without enough context, so we can just say move on or not. But when we were redoing the website, we made some case—we found the three reasons why people would wanna buy or three reasons why our customers who bought, bought. Right? We just looked backwards at our past 20 customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:08) We found these three in common. We made a case study for each one of the three, and we gave a little preview quote from it and then a download button and then the email HubSpot situation. Would you recommend not doing that and just letting them see it or collecting the emails? Or do you not have enough information to even talk about this with me?

(Dominic at 00:32:27) I believe that you should never put a speed bump and a fence with a guard in front of the content that you think is most helpful to your buyer. I think that there's a lot of research out there that says that 3% of people will fill out a form. 97% will just go somewhere else. I don't want you to have my info. I know you're gonna harass me if I tell you my info.

(Dominic at 00:32:50) And so the key is that, I think marketers believe though, if that person fills out the form, they must be really interested. And so it gives me a form of intensity of their desire so I know that they really—they know I'm gonna call them and they fill out the form anyway, which means they must be really interested. And I think it's interesting you go to the other side of it. What if we just gave it away to everybody? All 100% of people who wanted that can get it.

(Dominic at 00:33:14) Those 3% that would have filled out the form are gonna get it. The 97% who wouldn't have are now gonna get it. And those people who really get, you know, moved by it in a positive way, then they're gonna hit the contact us button and they're gonna say, I wanna talk to you. Or you get the ability to, with some of these platforms out there, to know who's engaging with the content, whether it's a form or not. Maybe, you know, on the company level, maybe not on the personal level, but you know, it was Coca-Cola that downloaded that or, you know, it was someone in the HR department at Mars that downloaded that.

(Dominic at 00:33:44) And so a lot of these intent data tools will be able to give you some level of visibility to who's engaging with your content. HubSpot has that out of the box. There's tools like Sixth Sense to do that. And so being able to see the content consumption without putting the roadblock in front of, the friction in the process, I think is generally a net game. You know, obviously, you need a form on a contact us form because who do I call?

(Dominic at 00:34:11) You might need a form on a webinar because you gotta send an invite with a link. But I would be very thoughtful. You might wanna stick a form on—you just won some amazing third-party vendor quadrant where you're a leader and you have the big document you wanna share and you paid $100,000 to get to use it. You wanna really hang it out there so people can see it and you know they're gonna want it so bad that they'll fill it out, maybe in that case. But I think of, more of an ungated experience is a way better customer experience.

(Dominic at 00:34:42) Build trust, educate them, and then earn the right to have them reach out to you. Add so much value that they come to you. And also get visibility to who those people are so that you can then nurture them and advertise to them and proactively make sure they don't forget about you. I think it's a shift and there's just some real research being done about, you know, what makes buyers less likely to buy. Spoiler: it's no pricing, it's forms, it's cold calls.

(Dominic at 00:35:11) And so, how do we just give them the pricing, give them the visibility, give them the demo or the document for free, and let them kind of consume as they want to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:25) Not to put you on the spot, but is 2X out of pricing on their website?

(Dominic at 00:35:29) We do not, because we custom solution usually. And so we would, and we're talking about how to do that. Our pricing's in our first meeting, though. We show up with a customer, like, this is how our rates go, but more importantly, what do you really wanna dig into? Because we're building your team.

(Dominic at 00:35:45) Do you need more content? Do you need more ops? Do you need more campaigns? Do you need strategy? Do you need, you know, those components that we put together are really unique and it's hard to share that.

(Dominic at 00:35:55) It's not a secret though. It's not like you have to answer my 15 qualifying questions before I give you a proposal. Like, no, we'll share it. It's about this amount depending on this problem. And I mean, we solve like a hundred different kinds of problems.

(Dominic at 00:36:07) And so it's really hard to, without overwhelming the information. I think it's more of maybe that comment is more of a software comment as well. Like, the software pricing is kinda standardized. It's very clear of what it is. And I think being able to put visibility around that is, if you can, is worth doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:24) Yeah. We ran into that issue when we were trying to figure out how to price the podcast production services, and what we ended up coming up with is just like a range. So we'd say, like, our average customer spends between X and X a month with us, and then people would have a good idea. And, well, their next question is inevitably, what makes you go across that range? It's like, well, the number of episodes you're recording.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:49) And so we found out that really quickly, you know, because we charge by number of—is that how you guys charge by? Like, if you have number of people joining your team?

(Dominic at 00:36:58) Yeah. It's usually some volume of, how much work, whether it's people, hours, deliverables, usually, it's some level of units of volume.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:08) Okay. Cool. Cool. Yeah. So we figured that in our deck for our first call, we put, you know, a range.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:15) And that will immediately—the moment they see the range, we can tell on their face. I mean, you know, they don't even have to say a word. Right? You can tell if it's within the realm of possibility for them or not. So—

(Dominic at 00:37:24) And it's better for everyone just to get that, you know, out on the table. And no reason to, you know—but I think it's like, this is awful. One thing we do do as well, and I think is a really good best practice, is if you're gonna give somebody a proposal, send the proposal before the meeting. Don't have this deck where like, I got slide one is all the great value I have, and two is all the stuff I'm gonna do for you, and but wait, there's more and there's more and there's more, and like you're holding the price into the last slide. I think that's annoying to buyers.

(Dominic at 00:37:51) They wanna know out of the gate. It is. You know, where is this? Because you know what? I'm thinking about it the whole time you're talking to me and I'd rather just know.

(Dominic at 00:37:58) And then if I have a problem with it, you know, bring it up in the very beginning of the call. Like, hey, just so you know that is not even on the planet we're on. Like, let's have that conversation because maybe there's a different solution and maybe there's a pivot we can take. Or maybe, you know, we shift the call and then, okay, maybe it's not the right thing for you right now, but let us give you some value and advice to what it is. Think of us then and maybe we're a fit then.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:18) We actually do that. The salespeople, we've trained everybody to love it. But at first, it was a difficult sell. I'd tell them, I was like, look, we're playing that we're playing this in decades, people. If somebody's not right, we're not gonna try to push them to stretch and to get it. We're gonna point them in a direction of, you know, how would I do this with scotch tape and bubblegum if I just wanna figure it out? Because I can say I did that because I started with nothing. You know, I started my show with nothing. And so I know how to do it, and I know why you wouldn't wanna start from nothing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:48) And so we can help them bridge that gap. But I always tell everybody on our sales team and marketing, I said, look, if we do right by the person that's in front of us on the call and we just do that throughout the hundreds of sales calls we do throughout the year, eventually, that's gonna come back to us in a net positive.

(Dominic at 00:39:05) Yeah. It's a small industry. And I agree with you on a long game. And, I mean, I can't tell you how many times. Actually, I just have it.

(Dominic at 00:39:12) 3:15. True story. Call at 3:00 Eastern with someone I talked to four years ago. He just reached out. He's like, hey, I don't know if you remember me, but we had this meeting and you came up to New York and you told my team about all the things that we could do and we weren't the right fit for you, but you were so helpful and we never forgot about you and now we're ready.

(Dominic at 00:39:31) And great. Like that's the way that sales and marketing should work. If you're, you know, you have to make—obviously you have to still sell things. And so if no one's buying your product, they're just taking your advice and you don't have four years to catch the revenue and deliver the financial returns you need to keep your company afloat, that's a very different story.

(Dominic at 00:39:51) But I think that's usually not the problem. The problem is, like, this person isn't ready for it right now. So how do we make sure that they get something that is valuable to them based on where they are? So when they are ready for it, we're their first call.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:03) Okay. So I'm headed in the right direction, I feel.

(Dominic at 00:40:06) I think so. I think so. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:08) Yeah. I say this stuff so that people—because people that are smart like you, they correct me if I'm wrong. And so I look at a lot of these interviews as me making statements and, like, letting people correct me because that tends to be the way to sharpen the blade for me.

(Dominic at 00:40:26) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:27) So if I'm saying something stupid, you gotta tell me.

(Dominic at 00:40:29) I don't think you said anything crazy. Yeah. I think you're thinking about—you're obsessing about how do I make this experience better for my customer. And that's what every CEO, product leader, sales leader, marketing leader, revenue leader should be working on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:45) I don't know exactly how to articulate this question because it's sort of come up throughout this conversation. But the points—there's two key points. The first one is, you know, you said twice, once with the downloads being blocking and the other one with the pricing and sending the proposal before the meeting. These things that I instinctively know when I go buy stuff, I bounce the site if they want my information in a form. Yet, I'm having the conversation on my side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:13) Oh, like, do I do this? And I'm talking to Dominic about it. And then the same thing is true for the pricing. Like, I found myself the other day in the meeting saying, oh, yeah, and we'll get to the pricing in a moment because I know you really want that. And now I'm thinking to myself, why didn't I just show it to them right then? You know? And so the question I'm trying to get at is, why is it so hard for us as professionals to do what we would want in our buying experience with our own products and companies?

(Dominic at 00:41:46) That's a great question. I don't know. I'll talk. I'll verbally process this one. On one front, I think maybe part of it comes from a little bit of difficulty in connecting, you know, the money you're going to ask for to the value that it's going to provide. And I think there's a bit of like, I'm going to ask someone to buy something. So I really have to make it clear to them what they're going to get for it. And it just is really hard for me to convey all—I gotta remind them of their problem.

(Dominic at 00:42:19) I gotta show them, you know, all the things I learned. So they see I'm really interested and engaged. I gotta show them our solution and why it's better. I gotta do all these things to justify the value for the money I'm gonna ask them for. And I think it's almost the clearer the value prop gets of like, yeah, if you hired us, we'd get, you know, 40% more pipeline and 30% less cost. And by the way, that's gonna cost you a million dollars a year. Like if the story is easy to articulate, I mean, it's very clearly a good idea that has economic value attached to it, it's way easier to talk about the number. Well, I think that's one piece of it. I think maybe the other piece of it is just that there's a just an element of, you know, you're asking someone for something.

(Dominic at 00:43:02) You're, you know, a respectful person. You don't want to just make them feel like you're there to close the deal. I think you want to build a human connection, a relationship, you know, create some shared alignment on what you're going to do. And maybe the third is also that the economics are a small part of the relationship. I think a lot of times people are buying something not because of what it costs. They care less what it costs.

(Dominic at 00:43:34) Like, who is it going to solve the problem? And I think this is the area where it's a good thing maybe to have the conversation focused in another area of, well, let's make sure we're aligned on solving the problem, that this is what you wanted to do, this is what I'm going to do. Let's really obsess about getting that right.

(Dominic at 00:43:49) And then let's tell you what it costs. And I think in that sense, it comes from the right place. I just think if we already know what the problem is and we already know how we're going to solve it, then let's just get to the clarity of what it's going to cost and move on from there. Make sure it's the right solution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:04) Yeah. I think you said that, Brent.

(Dominic at 00:44:06) Oh, you did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:07) I noticed that people that buy, our customers, they almost always say the same thing in the first call. Hey, we want to do this, and we just don't have the bandwidth. We want to do this. We don't have the bandwidth.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:20) And when they say those words, I'm like, great. Because it's not a money thing. It's not a will this work thing. It's not a should we do this thing. It's, hey, we want to do it. We don't have the capability to do it. And so I was making notes as you were talking, like capability, cost, relationships, all of those things. And I'm slowing down in my talking right now because I'm thinking about how they connect back to us. So I'm unofficially leveraging your knowledge as free consulting for my company.

(Dominic at 00:44:52) Hey, I'm here to leave you better than I found you. That's the point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:56) You're the best. Well, I know we are, we have a hard stop, and I want to make sure we have a call to action to get people to go check out 2X Marketing. Can you tell me what the website is and what's the first step that they should take?

(Dominic at 00:45:08) Yeah. It's 2x.marketing is the URL. And there's some videos on there about what we, what problems we solve and how we help someone run a better marketing organization. I think the most interesting part is Insights. I think that our typical customer is a marketing leader, someone who's trying to transform.

(Dominic at 00:45:33) And as a service company, you know, half of the interesting part is, well, we could actually do the work for you. The other half is like, what do we think? What do we think transformation means? What do we think value means? What do we think account-based marketing means?

(Dominic at 00:45:43) What do we think the job of the CMO is? And there's some really cool content in the Insights section where we share a bit about, you know, as I was a former CMO, now I'm kind of trapped in a CEO's body. You never stop being a CMO, I find now. And so we're marketers at heart. We're folks that are trying to help the marketing leader be more successful, how to drive more impact and value for their business.

(Dominic at 00:46:05) People spend money on marketing because they want more revenue. We want to talk about how to do that and have some points of view. And so I think if you're a B2B marketing leader trying to do something innovative and different with your marketing, or you're struggling with a do more with less mandate, or you have something that you know is incomplete or deficient, first place I would start is to learn about a better way. And I think we've got a lot of insights around the site to do that. A lot of people come to us right now that are totally in alignment to what the business needs them to do. They have to run more efficiently.

(Dominic at 00:46:41) They have to produce more impact. They might have to restructure their organization and think really intentionally about cost of people and cost of vendors. And a lot of CMOs and marketing leaders we meet, like, they're okay with that. They just don't know how to do it. They don't know where to cut and where to optimize or where to improve or where to change in a way that's actually going to produce a better result and operate a more agile, flexible, efficient engine.

(Dominic at 00:47:05) And I think we're the best in the world to help people figure that out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:09) I love it. Dominic, this is fantastic. 2x.marketing. Man, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Dominic at 00:47:15) It was fun. Great talking to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:17) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.