Pod Insights Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips The New Top Podcasting App in Town, and How to Structure Your Company to Have No Direct Reports About this episode In episode #2919, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss the evolution of podcasting, particularly the rise of YouTube as a dominant platform. They explore the use of AI tools for content creation and the benefits of managing without direct reports. Their discussion also delves into the role of AI in marketing and sales, and the challenges of navigating imperfect attribution in marketing efforts. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: 00:00 The Rise of YouTube as a Podcast Platform 02:58 AI Tools for Content Creation 05:58 Managing Without Direct Reports 12:04 The Role of AI in Marketing and Sales 17:57 Navigating Imperfect Attribution in Marketing Prefer single topic episodes? Head over to our YouTube channel. To suggest a topic, go to https://www.marketingschool.io. For more content from Eric and Neil, check out Eric’s Leveling Up with Eric Siu YouTube channel and Neil’s Neil Patel YouTube channel. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric's ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel, @ericosiu Instagram @neilpatel, @ericosiu Drop Us a Review If You Enjoyed the Episode!
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot's starter plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the starter plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. Kieran tweeted this a couple of weeks ago, Kieran Flanagan from HubSpot. So YouTube is now the biggest podcast platform in the US. And people watch 400 million hours of podcasts per month on YouTube.
0:44 Speaker 00 The biggest challenge to growing a podcast was always built-in distribution. None of the existing podcast platforms solve for discoverability. YouTube solved this. So I think we can talk about some things that we're doing with this right now. I've talked a lot about overlap. And overlap has gotten better now. There's an agent, an actual agent, that will watch your channels, all the videos. They'll watch all the videos from my channel. And it'll come up with the short-form clips. It'll come up with the mid-form clips, and it'll come up with the long-form clips. And they're all actually ready to be posted. It's better than any of the other of these agents that I've seen. And so, especially for our, this is a 90-minute recording session, it's perfect for these.
1:21 Speaker 01 How good is it, though?
1:22 Speaker 00 It's really good. Like, I'm not even joking. I'm like, when I see, Neil just rolled his eyes. But when I say good, I've tried all the other ones. I've tried Opus. I've tried all these things, right? This one is really good.
1:31 Speaker 01 As good as paying a human?
1:34 Speaker 00 I think, I think it's better than, than a human and finding the right moments. Because I've found of so many moments where, like, I did an interview with Gary Vee or SaaS Code and all these people.
1:41 Speaker 01 Or let me rephrase. If it was you doing it, are you saying it's better than you actually taking the time to find the right moments?
1:46 Speaker 00 I think so, yeah. Because I'm too, like, I'm not a detail-oriented person. You are. And so I get frustrated by doing that, right? But I'm like, dude, I'm like, how do we not find these moments? These are good moments.
1:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:56 Speaker 00 So I'm like, dude, it's, it's pretty close. And so I'm beta-testing it right now. I said, hey, guys, I'll talk about it if it's actually good. I'm talking about it here because it's actually good.
2:03 Speaker 01 See, I don't mind just watching the whole thing in frame, and then I'll just leave comments, every section where I think.
2:07 Speaker 00 See, that's how you work. I can't, like, I can't stand the details.
2:10 Speaker 01 Ah, that makes sense.
2:12 Speaker 00 Yeah.
2:13 Speaker 01 Yeah. No, and that is true. If you're not a detail-oriented person, using these tools or AI agents to help you out is great. And even if you are detail-oriented, it doesn't mean you won't miss stuff.
2:23 Speaker 00 By the way, I think the detail-oriented piece ties in with how to structure your company to have no direct reports. Because Neil and I, I've mentioned when we do this personality test together, his detail orientation is like 99%, mine is like 6%. But he has weaknesses, I have weaknesses as well. So because you have a structure that's similar to Dharmesh from HubSpot, where he has no direct reports, you started your company with no direct reports as well. So is there anything special you did to have that set up?
2:53 Speaker 01 Honesty? Yeah. I didn't pick any structure. I just had no direct reports and I didn't want any direct reports.
2:58 Speaker 00 Remember, it was you, me and Mike in the beginning, talking about doing it together. But you had never established that in the beginning, that you want to know direct reports. So when you, when you started it with Mike, did you just say, hey, Mike, I don't want to deal with direct reports?
3:12 Speaker 01 No, I just never had direct reports.
3:13 Speaker 00 So he consciously made a decision for you to not give you direct reports?
3:18 Speaker 01 No, I just never put anyone underneath me, even if I hire them. Even today.
3:23 Speaker 00 But don't a lot of people are like, oh my God, I want to work with Neil though. I want to work with Neil.
3:28 Speaker 01 No.
3:29 Speaker 00 No?
3:29 Speaker 01 No.
3:30 Speaker 00 Okay, so it just worked. People are just like, yeah.
3:32 Speaker 01 Because when we first started the organization, I was living in Vegas. The company was started in San Diego.
3:38 Speaker 00 Right, by Mike.
3:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, Mike was living with me in Vegas at the time and I'm like, dude, go down there and go create it. So he moved back home, which San Diego was his home because there's a lot of agencies there. And he went to go and create the agency. And as we hired people, like for example, Salo's been with us for ages. He pretty much runs marketing.
3:58 Speaker 00 He's Brazilian.
3:59 Speaker 01 He's Brazilian, but I never had him report directly under me.
4:02 Speaker 00 Was he with you since the beginning?
4:03 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
4:04 Speaker 00 I didn't know that.
4:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, day one. Actually, he predates day one.
4:09 Speaker 00 That's so interesting.
4:09 Speaker 01 Because we had NPD Brazil before we had NPD US.
4:13 Speaker 00 Oh, I didn't know that.
4:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:14 Speaker 00 Oh, so and same thing with Marina then?
4:17 Speaker 01 Marina, my assistant? We had many Marinas who worked for us.
4:20 Speaker 00 The last name starts with a T?
4:24 Speaker 01 I have no idea.
4:25 Speaker 00 The marketing one that helps you with your events.
4:28 Speaker 01 Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Her last name starts with a T. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, I think she's been with us for a year or two.
4:34 Speaker 00 Okay. Well, here's the point.
4:35 Speaker 01 She's one of my assistants. I only have two assistants.
4:38 Speaker 00 My point is, you look at Dharmesh Shah, his thing, when he told Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot at the time, he said, "Look, we're gonna start this company. I'm gonna have no direct reports. That's my rule. I'm gonna work on what I wanna work on, and then you're gonna give me resources when I want them, but I want no direct reports." And I think that's worked out, because even now, he's working on the forward-thinking things, like agents and things like that, right? And same for you. You get to work more on strategy. You get to work on marketing. Those are the things that you enjoy. So I think it's, it's not like you consciously did it, but it just kinda happened. I think for Dharmesh, it was a lot more intentional. But I think, again, this comes down to whatever works for you, and I've seen it work beautifully for Neil, so.
5:16 Speaker 01 Well, no, I've always never really had direct reports at any of the organizations. I've always chose not to.
5:20 Speaker 00 Kissmetrics, same thing?
5:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, so there's a video of Neil once, Kissmetrics did like a meeting. This is one of his analytics company. They raised some venture funding. And I think you guys did like, you guys did like a retreat with employees, right? And you're just sitting in the corner with your laptop, working. So, yeah. Yeah, that's just how Neil rolls, I guess.
5:38 Speaker 01 I'm, I love being an individual contributor. I love getting stuff done. I don't like managing people, so I never have people underneath me. And I don't know what title they give me at NP Digital.
5:49 Speaker 00 What do you mean? It says CMO in your email.
5:51 Speaker 01 Does it?
5:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
5:53 Speaker 01 No.
5:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
5:54 Speaker 01 Really?
5:55 Speaker 00 Yeah. Dude, he doesn't even know his own title.
5:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, you're right. It says Chief Marketing Officer. I don't read my email signature. But I'm not really the CMO of the company.
6:04 Speaker 00 No.
6:05 Speaker 01 It's just, it's a title I have, and Solo does not report into me.
6:08 Speaker 00 Yeah. So you will, you will reach out to the top, the top people to get things done. That's how you roll.
6:14 Speaker 01 In any department. I don't care if I'm supposed to be in that department. I will meddle wherever I want to get shit done.
6:21 Speaker 00 And I bet you, a majority of the time, even 51% of the time, people try to talk to you and try to stop you from doing it.
6:30 Speaker 01 Uh.
6:32 Speaker 00 Hey Neil, you need to let us do our work. You know, this is what you hired us for.
6:36 Speaker 01 Let's actually rephrase it. So when we started the organization, I would jump in, do whatever I want, when I wanted, and people didn't like it. They still don't like it today, even if they won't say it to my face, but I know they don't like it.
6:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
6:53 Speaker 01 But if you look at.
6:54 Speaker 00 Nobody will like it.
6:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, but if you look at today versus when we started the organization, call it seven years ago in the United States, I know what to meddle with and I know what not to meddle with, much more than I did when we started off. So for example, um, we want to make some changes in a specific region. And I was talking about this with my co-founder a year and a half ago. I right away started meddling and I created chaos because because I don't have direct reports, I also don't know the full picture every single time. So it can actually be really detrimental for me.
7:32 Speaker 00 Very disruptive.
7:33 Speaker 01 Yes, very disruptive. So now I tend to go to the person who will know the full story and I'll give them my take on it. And I'm like, if it's very important, I want it figured out right now. If it's not important, I'd be like, here's this information, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, because it doesn't affect our bottom line that much. So don't care. I don't want to waste any more time, but here are my thoughts. If it's something like marketing or sales or something that's a problem, I will just go medal directly and I will not uh get anyone's permission. But if it's related to people and moving them around or terminating or any of that, I go through others and I don't mess around because I usually don't know the full story. But if it's just getting
8:15 Speaker 01 something done, like revamping an ad campaign or sales close ratios aren't good enough, or something's off, any like those kinds of things, I will just get involved in the business, listen to recorded calls and try to figure out what people are doing wrong. And with AI now, like my co-founder Mike, he's very similar to me. There's AI tools that will uh show us a sales call or we can listen to it. If it's in Italian, it should, it you know, puts it out as English and it's not perfect, but it's good enough. So that way we can critique what's wrong with the sales pitch and how people can fix it.
8:47 Speaker 00 Dude, so one important thing you said, I think people can take away here is you basically, let's say, for example, if I find an article I really like, sometimes I'll just drop a link, I'll just say FYI, right? That means read it if you want. Sometimes I'll say like, highly recommended that you do something about this, right? Or sometimes I'd say like, hey, I need you to do this. And so this is interesting because the things that Neil really understands, like sales and marketing, plus it also affects his bottom line, he's gonna get involved, right? And say, hey, like, this is what I want you to do. But when it comes to people, like, you probably defer more than anything.
9:18 Speaker 01 Yes.
9:19 Speaker 00 And you're probably not gonna make any recommendations on people. And so, one, Neil's playing to your strengths here.
9:23 Speaker 01 I will if the people suck.
9:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, Neil has a big problem, especially if it's sales or marketing related to your bottom line, right?
9:29 Speaker 01 Anywhere in an organization, if someone's just terrible at their job, I don't care.
9:33 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:33 Speaker 01 But I'll have someone else deal with it.
9:35 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I think, one, this goes back to playing to your strengths again, and I just hit a time limit on X. But, oh, yesterday, remember when the fire alarm happened, we were on that call? What I wanted to mention is the things that we're talking about, listening to, you know, sales calls, for example, or listening to internal meetings. You and I don't have time for that all day. But imagine if there's an AI that's listened to all the feedback that you've given after watching the meetings and they've been trained on you. That's all going to happen, right? And I have a friend that's come out, he's coming out with something, I won't reveal it yet because I think it's in stealth, but he basically said, look, I'm gonna give you something where you don't need to install anything new, it'll just look at how engaged people are. So if you have a designer on your team, how often are they logging into
10:16 Speaker 00 Figma and making changes? How often are they sending emails or being active in HubSpot or whatever, right? And that's not exactly perfect, but we're just saying that like, there's a lot, Jamie Dimon earlier talked about, hey, like Zoomers, for example, you can't tell who's active and who isn't. And there are, he even said himself, this CEO guy I talked to, he's like, look, there's a lot of people that brag about taking Fridays and Mondays off and being on the ski lift during a call or whatever, and they brag about it as if it's cool, but it actually is toxic to the entire organization, right? Because other people find out about it, right? And so he's like, we need to have something where we can track people and gamify the entire organization. And he's gonna let me test it. If I really love it, I'll let you know. And I don't even know if you roll it out, but I just love these things because you basically like you get to gamify. You get to see leaderboards and things like that.
11:01 Speaker 00 And I think that's where the future of work is going.
11:04 Speaker 01 But I think this is where you and I are different. When you're talking about the AI agent, listening to all the meetings and all that kind of stuff. That's where I personally shine because I'm very detail oriented and I will, I do have the time and I will listen to a lot of those.
11:19 Speaker 00 How many hours are you listening per week?
11:21 Speaker 01 A lot, but it's not necessarily on a weekly basis, whenever there's a problem. So if there's an issue with sales, I will spend eight hours, 10 hours a day, whatever I need to do to solve that problem. Because I know it's going to impact our bottom line. I look at things as what is the biggest issue that's holding us back from growing? And I will just go in there myself. And if I had to listen to the calls or be in on the meetings, I will, and I'll work on fixing them. And then once the ratios and the numbers are good enough, I just move on. It's not like I'll go back and listen to tons more sales calls unless the ratios or the numbers drop. And I can see there's a glaring issue. If that's the case, I will jump back in, but if not, I'll go on to something else.
12:01 Speaker 00 Do you sometimes have to repeat solve this problem after you listen to eight hours of calls? Maybe six months later, nine, 12 months later, you find yourself solving the same problem again?
12:11 Speaker 01 No, because if I do, that means I have the wrong person and they'll be switched out.
12:14 Speaker 00 Yep, there you go.
12:15 Speaker 01 So it sounds bad, but.
12:17 Speaker 00 This is, I don't think it sounds bad, that's business. I think this is great because I think a lot of operators listening to this, like I don't say everyone can, you can just magically have no direct reports. Right? A lot of people listening, especially founders, you're going to have direct reports and you're going to be operating. But if you can free up your time and just focus on the highest leverage things, I actually think that's better for your business. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples and conversations with marketing leaders,
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13:13 Speaker 01 It could be. I think it depends on the person. I think some people are amazing at managing, building culture and leading. That's not me.
13:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. I think what I'm saying is for someone like you, or someone like a Darmesh, for example, or even Elon, for example, where he jumps around solving things. I'm actually best for that, which is why I'm looking for someone that can take on more of the day-to-day stuff.
13:33 Speaker 01 So you just need a CEO?
13:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. It's funny. I'll tell you a story after this, after we finish recording, but continue.
13:40 Speaker 01 I have someone for you.
13:41 Speaker 00 I don't. I'm a mess and I wish I did.
13:43 Speaker 01 Dude, you're giving my hopes up, man.
13:46 Speaker 00 I have this one over here on, this guy tweeted this. He has, he says he knows nothing about ads. So he used OpenAI Deep Research all week to help him start using Google Ads. And this is interesting. He said, "The campaign it helped me create is driving $600 a day in less than five days on a very small starter budget. Every day I give new data to O1 Pro, iterate and numbers go up. It's crazy." So, look, it's $200 a month for it, whatever. I think we're gonna hear a lot of these stories, and it's probably not that good, this campaign. But what is amazing is it got going for him, where someone 10 years ago probably would be stuck. So Deep Research, have you tried it? No. You pay for the $200 ChatGPT, right? Yeah, it's so good. It's like, I had to do research on the ABM space, right, for Carrot,
14:30 Speaker 00 and then it showed how much they all charge, how much like, I would have paid like a couple thousand dollars for this report. How much do they all charge? What's their go-to-market strategy? What are their weaknesses right now? You know, what's my biggest weakness right now? You know, what are the, what should we be attacking, right? And it just does, it's like 80, 90% accurate, because it's missing context. And I'm just like, wow, I just prompted it, and it gave me 20,000 words, and it took like 10 minutes to get there. How good is it gonna get in like a year or two?
14:55 Speaker 01 That's true. And what's funny is you said last time we're recording this, I should try it out, and you're like, "I bet you won't try it out."
15:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:03 Speaker 00 Yeah. Well, typically, you need to hear from me a couple of times before you try it. So this is only number two. So you need to hear it like seven times, I think.
15:09 Speaker 01 Also, I need something to use it on.
15:11 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:12 Speaker 01 And because I would just focus on solving problems that are usually related to marketing and sales, I...
15:20 Speaker 01 There's probably good use cases for it, but I haven't run into one.
15:23 Speaker 00 If I positioned it around M and A and AI and how it'll affect your business and then you inserted all your numbers in there.
15:29 Speaker 01 But that's, I would more so have my team do that. My problem with M and A, I don't really spend much time on M and A. I spend time where I talk to founders and try to help convince people to sell to us. That's actually not that many hours. M and A is such a slow process. I do not do well with M and A. Like it doesn't go with my personality.
15:45 Speaker 00 I'm not saying you should, I'm saying this is like an exercise with it to get your foot in the door to actually want to use it. That's what I'm saying. I'm not saying, because I'm not saying you love doing M and A stuff, right? And I'm not a detail guy. I don't like looking at all the stuff, but I'm just saying, I'm trying to find different exercises for you to actually use it. That's all.
16:02 Speaker 01 But I would have my team use it, the people who run M and A like Carlos, and then get back to me. I more so really do limit most of my time to marketing and sales. Like that's really my core focus.
16:17 Speaker 00 By the way, when Neil says that, it's not like he's actually in the, in the accounts implementing unless he's creating content, for example. But he's actually listening to calls, he's calling people and he's, he's pushing things through.
16:29 Speaker 01 And fixing whatever issues I see.
16:31 Speaker 00 Yeah. But oftentimes that requires a phone call, requires communication with people. And so I, I think when we say, or when Neil says marketing, it's, it's, it's more than just traditional marketing.
16:40 Speaker 01 Correct. Like if ads aren't working, I will just go into the campaigns and figure it out myself.
16:45 Speaker 00 Yep.
16:46 Speaker 01 And I'll just figure out how to run it. And people are like, you haven't run an ad in a while. It's okay. I'll figure it out today. And I will figure it out that day.
16:53 Speaker 00 It's not like these campaigns are that, these platforms are that complicated, you know?
16:57 Speaker 01 I've done better than you guys in less than six hours and it's a Saturday. And yeah, the team doesn't necessarily like.
17:03 Speaker 00 Oh, that, that also pisses people off too.
17:05 Speaker 01 Yes. I'm just really direct. I'm just like, this is what you did wrong. Here's how you can improve upon it. And people will come to me and say, Neil, this is what you're doing wrong and this is what you could do better. And I, and when they tell me that, I'm like, thank you. You're right. I appreciate this and now I can improve going forward. I don't take that as bad. I do like, when people tell me I suck, I'm like, great. How do I get better?
17:27 Speaker 00 Yeah. You don't get pissed at those things. You, you, you get pissed at other things.
17:31 Speaker 01 Yeah. Speaking of AI, you have in here as Accenture's 1.2 billion in AI revenue or grift?
17:37 Speaker 00 Oh yeah. I knew you'd like that one. So. This guy Rohit Mittal. Mittal? Indian last name?
17:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:44 Speaker 00 Okay. Accenture has 1.2 billion in new bookings related to generative AI. And it has 69,000 people working in data and AI. 69,000 people who don't know anything about AI are helping the largest US companies with navigating the fast-changing AI world. One of the biggest grifts in the world. So I'm looking at the report. This is their, they're highlighting their report here. So we had another milestone, approximately 500 million revenue, 1.2 billion in new bookings. So I don't know why he's calling them a grift, but here's what I can say. I interviewed two or three people. I've talked, I paid them for their time at Accenture, right? And I said, so if you're a CEO, what would you do? And one person said, this is interesting because he closed 40 million in bookings around AI this year, right? I'm like, what would you do?
18:27 Speaker 00 He's like, well, if I was a CEO, I would make sure that everyone understands what they're talking about with AI. I'm like, what do you mean by that? He's like, we don't, like, we're not trained on a lot of these things and a lot of things that we're selling. It's like, so I'm like, oh, so this actually aligns with the story I'm getting behind the scenes with these people that I'm just trying to learn more from.
18:46 Speaker 01 It's also easier for him to close, for her to close $40 million worth of revenue with the Accenture brand.
18:52 Speaker 00 Yeah. He doesn't think the music will.
18:54 Speaker 01 Stop.
18:56 Speaker 00 Yeah. He doesn't think the music will stop, but he does think that there's, it does feel like they're kind of, what he's saying is like, it feels like it's kind of air. So anyway, not my words.
19:06 Speaker 01 Dude, time will tell.
19:07 Speaker 00 We should talk about what to do about imperfect attribution. So earlier we talked about poopy attribution from the YouTube video, right? That's, that's example of, it's hard to track. How are you going to track when someone's sitting on a toilet? Right? Maybe you can. But then also, we had someone that was a former single-grain client come in for Carrot, the account-based marketing software. And that's hard to attribute because that original customer came from seeing me when I was just walking around at Saster. This was a long time ago. And they became a client for years and years, right? And then he just happened to hear about it and then he told his director of marketing. So these things are really hard to attribute, right? And then with Carrot, this is interesting. This is using Carrot to market Carrot. And.
19:51 Speaker 00 We had a lead come in in December. They got on a demo call and then they ghosted us, right? Or like, okay, they're probably not interested anymore. Then their CMO saw a personalized ad and then their VP of Marketing saw a personalized ad and they both forced him to get back with us. And then after he went from like negative 50 interest to like positive 200, right? Maximum interest. But it's just hard when you have, it's, I know as marketers, like direct response marketers, we like to have perfect attribution. But the question is what to do about imperfect attribution? Because we live in an imperfect world.
20:25 Speaker 01 I just spend a portion of the marketing dollars on imperfect stuff. So take, you can pick whatever percentage you want. We're probably around 30 to 35% of our marketing dollars goes on stuff that we can't really track. It's imperfect. But the way we look at it is those platforms have eyeballs and a portion of those eyeballs we know would be our customers. The way I look at it is the, I don't think it's Ogilvy that said this. I was, I think this is somebody that knew Ogilvy, but you remember the quote around, I know advertising works. I just don't know, I know 50% of my advertising works. I just don't know which 50%. It was a good quote. I've never heard of it before.
21:02 Speaker 00 Yeah. So that's what it is, guys. If you guys have any other questions, let us know. And that being said, go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster and we'll see you tomorrow.
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