The Two Main Factors That Drive Business Success

In this episode, Eric and Neil dive into the battle between profitability and loyalty, why leads fuel growth, and how to innovate without being first. They reveal how to stand out in an AI-saturated landscape using proprietary data, events-driven B2B strategies, and recruiting frameworks that scale revenue. Key takeaways ● Marketing + innovation compound long-term growth ● Proprietary data and human stories beat AI content ● Role-play hiring and referrals protect your pipeline TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Drucker on marketing and innovation (03:35) Profitability vs. customer loyalty (06:12) Events-driven B2B growth strategies (15:03) Proprietary data storytelling (23:32) Recruiting frameworks that drive revenue 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗟 Welcome to Marketing School, one of the top business podcasts with over 61 million downloads. Each episode delivers actionable marketing tips and strategies from two entrepreneurs who truly practice what they preach. The show is hosted by Eric Siu, founder of Leveling Up and Single Grain, and Neil Patel, co-founder of Neil Patel Digital and recognized by Forbes as a Top 10 Marketer. LEARN MORE ABOUT THE HOSTS Eric Siu – Leveling Up: https://www.youtube.com/@LevelingUpOfficial Neil Patel: https://www.youtube.com/@neilpatel FREE RESOURCES Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Ubersuggest: https://www.ubersuggest.com/ Answer The Public: https://www.answerthepublic.com/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes and spreadsheets. HubSpot 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. I'm gonna ask you a question. So Peter Drucker, the business executive, thinks that there's only two major things that are important for a business. What do you think those two things are, if you're just guessing, just randomly?

• 0:44Speaker 01

  The two major things?

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, the two main things for a business.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  I can name a few. Profitability is one, like your revenue and overall how profitable it is to your financials. If your financials suck, then who cares? And then I would say another thing, if you're just looking at the business metrics, not like the team, because if you have a shitty team, you're not gonna have a good business, right? But if you're looking at other good metrics, is how loyal are your customers? Can you keep them? Are they evangelizing? Do they keep paying overtime? Are they bringing in more customers? Or do you have a churn and burn style business?

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. So Michael here in the comments actually got it, right? So good job, Michael. Peter Drucker said marketing and innovation. And so like these things, these things kind of come downstream, like the things that you mentioned, right? Like if you're bringing in leads and you're innovating, that means hopefully that you're not just innovating on bullshit, right? You're actually serving your customer. If you keep these flywheels going, you're gonna be fine, right? And then when, when, when, you know, you first started MP Digital, the thing that was the most important that even Mike, your co-founder, agrees with you on is the leads were the main thing, right? The other things you can figure out over time, because if you got the leads, like you've kind of solved half the problem already. And then in the innovation piece, like we are forced, like your business or my business, like what you're doing with, what you're doing with Uber Suggest right now, or Answer the Public, what we're doing with Click Flow and Carrot,

• 1:58Speaker 00

  we're constantly talking to customers and figuring out how we can innovate and do better. Because if you, like, if you're not, if you're not delivering a great product, what happens? Then it's a bunch of smoke and mirrors, right? Which is unfortunately, I think that's what happened for the Clueley, at least the first launch of their product. And the last thing I'll say around this, can you see my screen?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  So this guy Kerry basically summarizes TLDR. So Roy Lee, the founder of Clouly, was explaining the Clouly pivot and a brief history, right? So nine months, I built an interview coder, an undetectable translucent desktop, blah, blah, blah. So this guy's like, okay, TLDR, too long, didn't read. We see ourselves as a viral marketing company, not a product company. So that goes back to what you were just saying. Having a good product that can sustain or service that can sustain the test of time. That's what matters a lot more versus a kind of like a quick like PR bump.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  So the one thing I would disagree with that Peter Drucker guy. And I used to have a master class subscription back in the day. I think you did two probably at one time.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, our mutual friend maybe bought it for us. I never, yeah.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  I don't know who ended up giving it to me, but someone gave it to me as a gift. I only used it for that time where I had the free master class. I think it was one year or something like that. And one of the interviews that I remember and it really stuck with me was a Howard Schultz interview. And he was talking about innovation. Innovation is really hard. And I look at my previous co-founder, my brother-in-law Heathen Shaw. He, he always likes doing companies that are in new spaces and trying to do new products that no one's ever seen. And Howard Schultz breaks down like innovation is really tough. It's a big hit or miss. You get really bloody being the first going through the door. And it's hard, like most people fail at it. Elon Musk does a really great job at innovation, but most people don't.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  And he goes on to saying like, I'd rather be the entrepreneur or I'm paraphrasing here, but he's like, I'd rather not be the innovator. I'd rather just go into a big, massive space and just do something a little bit better. Now that could be kind of a form of innovation. It's probably not a true form of innovation. Yeah, a little bit, but not really like, hey, we're gonna add. There's different types, but like, hey, we're gonna provide better customer service or put your name on a cup. All those little things do matter. And what I ended up learning through this company, NP Digital, because it was one of the first companies where we started. And I truly didn't innovate much when we started. I was entering a massive crowded marketplace where most of the things were determined.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  And what we felt in this space was clients were really under service. And what I learned from private equity, going through the process when we were thinking about selling and we decided not to was.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Private equity is just like, oh yeah, you don't have to create a new company. You just have to go after big spaces. We tend to just invest into companies that are in existing spaces that are just massive. And it's okay if they're just, you know, another, you know, look like company. The space is big enough, everyone can get drunk and make money.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's something you learn a little. I mean, it's good. I think we're still relatively young, but I think it took us too long to learn about total addressable market and how that affects everything. But I would go back and like a couple of months ago, we did a pod where we talked about how when it comes to innovation, let's say we're invading like a beachfront, right? You're not going to be the first, you're not going to be in the first boat. Typically, you're like parachuting in on like a plane. You're like, you're not even the first or your second or third wave. You're like the fourth, fifth or sixth wave, right? When something is proven out. Now for me, I like to come in on like the probably second or third wave. But I don't like to be at the first. I don't want to be like at the forefront of it because there's, there's a lot of risk that's tied in with that. Right. But there's different forms of innovation is what we're trying to say. So.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's different forms and same with marketing. I, I hear people constantly telling me, because Eric and I are marketers. Hey, you need to do more social media. Oh, you can edit your YouTube videos this way, or oh, you can end up doing this with your SEO and getting more traffic. Look, I get it all. I found what the marketing that works best for my own company is me and my team. And we don't always have to do it together. They do it independently as well.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Host events in different parts of the world because we're in so many countries at this point. And we invite really large brands. We educate them on what's new and all these people who work at these publicly traded companies get to know us. They may not hire us ever, but a lot of them hop around. They respect the information and a lot of them talk about us or potentially hire us at the new company that they go to, even if they didn't hire us at the current company they're at. That's how we've been growing a lot. It's tactical or it's, you know, I'm going out there, uh, doing hand to hand combat. It's not scalable. It works and people are like, oh, that's ugly. That's a crappy form of marketing. But again, it works for us and it drives a lot of revenue, you know?

• 6:59Speaker 00

  What I find interesting, so you and I, we love traveling and doing these things, but I actually find it pretty stupid too. Because, okay, like last year during this time, you and I were in Germany, speaking at the This is Marketing Conference, right? And we were in, again, we were in Frankfurt, and so, yes, we're recording podcasts and now we're speaking, but like, what do we generally do? We stay in the hotel room and we, we work. And so like, I just like-

• 7:21Speaker 01

  We eat ice cream and baklava.

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, but like, we enjoyed the local food and we're literally just sitting in our room working and we're probably ordering room service and all that. But like, at the same time, I really enjoy it, but it's like, it's pretty stupid if you think about it.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's exhausting and we should experience the city more, but dude, we work too much to experience the city more.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I tried to experience a little more, like, at least I walked in the park. Hey, by the way, let me show you something real quick. Dude, you're in London, I mean, you, you deserve to go to all the parks. So anyway, do you see this thing on the bottom right over here on my screen? So I, I added this, we're, we're running a test right now on the singlegrain.com website, right? So when you go on mobile, like this thing pops up, ask AI about singlegrain, right? And then if you, if you click on this,

• 8:07Speaker 00

  it, it pops up this prompt over here. So it's a very favorable prompt for singlegrain. It says, "As a marketing leader, I want to know what makes singlegrain the best marketing agency to handle my campaign to hit my ROI targets? What are their biggest strengths and weaknesses?" So the reason-

• 8:21Speaker 01

  No, what are their biggest strengths and wins, not weaknesses?

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Oh, sorry, biggest strengths and wins, I didn't put weaknesses. So, so I'm, I'm back on, so the original screen, can you see the original screen or no?

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Okay, so my hypothesis here is that ChatGPT has memory, okay? Claude has memory, these other ones are all building memory into it. And so if, if someone's looking for a digital marketing agency, they land on my website and they ask a question about singlegrain, or maybe they appear on some other articles and they ask to summarize the article or whatever, we're gonna have more citations, right? And the funny thing is, my friend tested this, and then immediately after, he asked like, what's the best marketing agency? What popped up first? Singlegrain, right? So we haven't tested this enough, I want to see how this affects citations. Like, I see that face, like, you, you might as well test it too. That, that, that's what I want to-

• 9:04Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna test it right now, but no, I'm smiling because of something else. So for the past few months, I've been getting hit up by some of these LLMs. You, you know the names, I'm not gonna mention the names because I'm not supposed to talk about it. But I, I'm allowed to talk about things from anonymous perspective and, no joke, two of them hit me up. And they asked me, hey, you've been SEO for a while. How'd this game of cat and mouse work? And I'm like, why are you asking? And I know quite a few people that work at these LLMs. And they're like, dude, people are trying to manipulate the results. And we feel that the quality of, you know, their blank LLM is not as good as it used to. And I'm like, yeah, well, what do you expect?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  You create an algorithm, marketers go and try to tweak and work at it because it makes some money. And you're looking at a spam, but it's not really spam. They're getting paid by really large corporations that you want as advertisers to go get them, you know, more placements. Cause the big spenders are large corporations by far. They're like, okay. So they're like, we have this issue right now. And they were describing, they're like, a lot of people are just creating content and just mentioning how their company is the best. And our LLMs are are pushing it out there. And I'm like, I know. And I'm like, have you noticed that people can write how amazing their company is on their own blog? And then you guys cite it as the best? And I'm like, Google would never do that.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  You know, I'm like, they're smart enough to sniff out a lot of stuff. Don't get me wrong, Google's not perfect either, but I shouldn't say they would never do that. They're less likely to do that because their algorithms are much more sophisticated. I'm like, I can go take an article on Joe the Plumber making up a site and talk about how amazing NP Digitalism Marketing and you'll cite it. And I'm like, you guys aren't looking at enough metrics around the authority of the person who wrote it, the domain. Giving a domain a rating and a score. They're not, of course, telling me their algorithm in full or anything like that. They're kind of giving me some sprinkles here and there, and I have to try to piece things together.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  And that was a purpose of meeting because I wanted to learn where they're going and the direction. But they're like, yeah, you know, a lot of them are looking at hiring engineers from Google and these other places that have dealt with this to try to make it more sophisticated. And I was like, it's not about fighting SEOs or marketers or business owners. You gotta just think logically. If a random site talks positively about someone, it's probably not worth as much as if. You know, um, a really popular industry website talks about how amazing that company is, and it's not sponsored, it's not paid, it's not written as a guest post, is written by a journalist who has credibility within that space. So like, yeah, good point. And this is stuff that they'll naturally progress to, whether it's now or whether it's six months

• 11:51Speaker 01

  or two years, I don't know, but they're already moving in that direction. And I think all the quick manipulable ways to get mentioned more on ChatGPT, more power to anyone who wants to do them, but I think it's going to be short-lived. And same with perplexity and all the other ones out there.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  This game, I mean, this is, I mean, this goes all the way back to the Yellow Pages or even before that. I don't even know what people used before, like maybe in the Stone Ages or whatever, like how people gamed it, right? Um, but I would just say that, um, you know, it's, this is why we've talked about ChatGPT apps as well. Like, okay, when there's a new app store that comes out, like that, that is like, you're just trying to be first, but that that's part of the game, right? So, um, as they continue to improve their product, like these things will be patched up. And so I, I think even Google in the early days, like you think about the, the, even, even when, when I came into the space in 2010 or so, um, it was, there was still a lot of spam happening, right? And so, um, but now they've, they've gotten a lot better. So Google especially, it's, it's, it's much harder to game. So play the game, but play for the long term.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Um, like, by the way, because we're talking about content, did you see the, the pod that he did with, um, so Elon did a podcast with Joe Rogan and he basically said that all AI content will become, all content will become AI content. What do you think about that?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I disagree with Elon, but that's just his take. I know he's a world's most richest person, but he's been wrong in many cases.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. So what percent of content do you think is going to be AI content in the next like five to 10 years?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Oh, the majority. When I say majority, more than 90%.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So 90 to 95% maybe more than that, right? So the question that I had, so on, on the drive over to, to Capitol Camp, um, one of the guys in the car was asking, he was like, Eric, so if you think most content is going to be AI content, which is what I believe, um,

• 13:32Speaker 01

  But you said all, right?

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Or is it most? He said all, he said all, but I think for me, I think it's going to be 90, 95%. So, okay, the question is, and we should talk about this, it's how do we stand out in a world where the majority of content is AI content? You, you want to go first or I can go?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  I think we both know the answer. This is simple. You do human generated content. We always say it. You zig when they zag. You talk about your own experiences. You talk about new stuff that's not regurgitated. You be authentic, personal. You do all these other things that it's harder for AI to replicate. Yes, they could try to be authentic and show empathy and all this kind of stuff with a fake AI avatar. But if people know it's AI and they had to start disclosing it, I don't think it's gonna do as well. And I bet you laws are gonna come out where they're gonna have to start disclosing what's AI and what's not AI content.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  I guarantee you, someone's doing some form of identi- identity verification using the blockchain and they're gonna make a lot of money doing it. I don't have time for that idea right now, but it's a great idea. So, and I'm sure someone's working on it. But my take on it is, in a, in a world with ninety, ninety-five percent AI content, the way you stand out is, one, you tell really good stories, okay? You tell, you get really good stories by doing interesting things and you're able to tell interesting things. Or you could do what the founders guy does, like David Sandler. You tell good stories about other founders. You can certainly do that as well. Strategy goes a long way too. And so, Neil, we've kind of talked about this, but when, this is in the context of B2B. But whenever we're talking in a video or at a conference, whenever we go tactics, that doesn't do as well for pipeline generation

• 15:03Speaker 00

  as it does versus strategy versus talking about something that's overarching, right? That's more related to B2B. But the other thing I'll say too is proprietary data. So you actually do a good job of this. Other players in this space, like SimilarWeb for example, they do a lot of good job with explaining data in a very interesting way. It's simple, read, easy to, to, to read, like visualizations, right? And so I think having proprietary data, having interesting products and telling stories about that, that product or stories in your space, that's gonna go a long way. But that, that also goes all the way back to storytelling. And then the final thing I'll say is, is we, we always talk about this. So, right now, guys, this is a live event, okay? This is also content creation, but this is a live event. But doing live events in person. So Neil just did a couple of live events this week. I did a live event as well.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  And throwing your own live events too. And so, the more, I think, human, human-led stuff is gonna go a long way. And even Sam Altman himself has said that, uh, human-led experiences are gonna become worth a lot more. And at this event too, I had a couple of people come up to me. He's like, hey, Eric, when are you gonna do leveling up again? Which is the event, right? When are you gonna do it? And I'm like, I don't know, they're a pain in the ass, but I do enjoy them. It's not like they're a moneymaker, by the way. Like, when you do these events, they're not a moneymaker in the short term. So.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Yep. So, um, yeah, no, look.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Here's a question for you, okay? You, I would say you're a startup still. I wouldn't classify us as a startup. I don't mean that in a bad way or a positive way. I'm just saying, I would say you're more of a.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  I would say we're a startup. You guys are like a mid-sized company, right?

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Do you agree with that?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  And you guys move faster than us, right? You have less people, less bureaucracy. The list goes on and on.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  We already know AI is changing marketing. We already know AI is changing business.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  As a startup, what are you doing to ensure that your content, your marketing is adapting super fast and is staying ahead? Like you, you just did that tweak on single rain, right? It would take me longer to do that tweak than probably your team to do it. Cause again, too much bureaucracy and then I gotta do it in many languages and all this other crap that just takes longer. What, what are you doing right now to ensure that you guys stay ahead? And then I can tell you what we're doing as a mid-sized business.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  So I think we should set the tone here. So our definition of startup is we have 60 people. Okay, Neil has like a thousand plus, okay? And that's, and that's, that's what I refer to as midsize and startup. So that's the vernacular. And the things that we're doing, earlier I just showed it already. Like we're, we're, we're testing that little, you know, the little marker at the bottom where it's like, ask chat GPT about, ask single, ask chat GPT about single grain or whatever, right? So the thought there is like, okay, is, is injecting ourselves into the conversation from our website into chat GPT or these other LLMs? Is that going to help us, right? So we're going to be testing that. And then we'll run it through like these LLM trackers in a couple of weeks to see how that goes, right? That's one element.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  The, the other element I would say is we use our internal product. I think you guys have something like this too, but we use Click Flow to help us with updating, deleting, consolidating content, with finding the right internal links as well, finding the right Reddit threads to engage with. And then also creating net new content for us too. We're, we're talking production grade content, not just AI-generated slop. And I would also say that in terms of.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  I mean, webinars are, we're just talking purely marketing right now, right? For our companies that we're talking about?

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Okay, so you and I both do webinars, that's a big piece of it. The other thing I would say is, we try, we're trying to ingest more content from like our Gong, like our sales intelligence tool, to give us more content ideas. Because when people are talking to sales, for example, like those are the real pressing points that people have, versus us just kind of, you know, olden days, you just look at keyword research, right? Now we're looking for real problems, um, at, real problems from real people to create content around. So that's at least a starting point, and I, I'm sure I have more that will pop up. 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

• 19:18Speaker 00

  single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples, and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so on our end, the way we're trying to use AI to go faster, um, as a midsize company, because again, we have bureaucracy, uh, we found that presentations work really well, so we try to do a ton of presentations, but we're using, I don't, I think my team said Mantis, but I could be wrong.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  Mantis, M A N U S.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  It's something like that. It's Manus, I know it starts with man, and it helps them make the decks way faster, although it can go rogue.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  It's Manus.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  It's Manus. So I know we're using that to crank out presentations at a much faster pace. The other thing that we're doing is, we have such large data sets, we're using AI to analyze our data sets per industry and aggregate, and try to find opportunities. And that allows us to figure out where to spend our time faster, uh, versus us doing a lot of trial and error. The other thing that we're doing is we're scraping the web. This isn't really AI on the third one, but we're scraping a lot of the web. And we're looking for businesses that are constantly experimenting. And then from there, we're trying to track all the experimenting that they're doing. We then dump the changes into AI and then AI ends up showing us what patterns are similar across all the data sets in the industries.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  And it ends up giving us ideas on what is probably gonna end up becoming, what's probably gonna end up working if we make those changes, like the probability of success. I jacked that one from Gajan's playbook from Spiralize.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  The other thing that I say that we're doing, because there's a lot of bureaucracy on what tools we can or can't use. Cause some of them won't update their terms of service to make them compatible to all the countries we're in and their laws. We encourage our team members personally and on their own time to experiment with these tools, not with clients on their own personal PCs, not with company laptops or anything like that, to go experiment with them and figure out what's valuable or not. And that's helping us understand which ones we need to double down on and call and figure out how we can get customized contracts and negotiate. Because it just takes us a while to go through the hoops from the legal aspect.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  So it's easier to have our team on their personal time with their personal computers, non-client data, non-client work. Just test out these tools and figure out which ones a company should be using.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Cool. I have a few more from my end, then we can move on to the next topic. By the way, we've done well with not actually pulling from the topics today. It's much more free flowing. So one, we've done something internally where we called the AI contest. And so recently we had everyone make a Lindy workflow. So that's like just like an agent workflow. It's no different than, or very similar to like Zapier, N8N, make.com. And basically winner got money, second place also got money too, third place also got money. And we kind of celebrated this and everyone was required to make a loom explaining what their product solved. I would say the overall engagement rate we had with this in terms of completion was about 52%. So we want to get that higher. The reason we're teaching everyone how to build these agentic workflows right now is so when we build other software,

• 22:43Speaker 00

  because ChatGPT ChatKit is going to allow us to create these workflows and then connect them with our products. We're trying to get everyone ready for that. So people that are actually in the trenches, working on these problems already, they're trying to make their lives simpler. And I've seen some pretty interesting, some interesting workflows, like very easy ones on like, hey, we're actually over budget on this client over here. Oh, we should do something about this, right? Or like making sure that, you know, every, every single client request gets responded to or something like that, right? Some are fairly basic, some are a little more complex. And some will build like an entire, like sales dashboard that follows up with people. So that, that's one piece of it. The other piece, I've been telling a lot of people about this. I'm pretty sure I told you too. But Juicebox.ai, which raised like thirty six million bucks from Sequoia recently,

• 23:26Speaker 00

  that it is amazing at finding the two, two promotions at two different jobs. And we, we not only want to find people from a recruiting standpoint with two promotions from two different jobs, which I stole from Neil, but we want them to have an average tenure of three years and their current tenure also needs to be three years as well. And so literally you can recalibrate the agent, but it just keeps working on that. And each agent costs like a hundred fifty dollars. And so that's a pretty damn good savings in terms of like paying like a contingent, contingency based recruiter. And that helps our recruiting team a lot. So that's been good. Stanley, I talked about earlier, Stanley with Stan, it created that, those, those two posts that generate a lot of views. And then obviously you, you guys have heard me talk about MCPs quite a bit.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  I still use MCPs quite a bit in terms of helping me find pages that are doing well for us and from our analytics and then using Ahrefs to find other keywords we should be going after. And then drafting blog posts based on our writer guidelines into our WordPress that we can review. And so those are just a handful of things that we play around with.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  So I, I know this isn't necessarily marketing, but you want me to break down how we really try to recruit these days? For like positions that make us money? We used to do the model that I was talking about with you on LinkedIn. We still do it to some extent. But even when you do that, it really is hit or miss. There's some people just that don't work out. So we look in our organization on who are our best performers. Cause usually best performers, and this only works once you're already.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Can I guess what you're gonna say? Can I guess what you're gonna say? Okay. You do referral recruiting where you go to that person and say, hey, who are the best people on your list? List over here that we should be hiring, something like that.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Uh, it is referral, but it's not kinda like that. I'll give you a real example when I was in Spain or Madrid a few days ago. So we're, we're looking for someone to head up sales. So our head of, uh, our managing director who manages EMEA, I think, uh, his name is Mark. I think it's EMEA or, you know, Europe, or I don't know what his title is.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  So he, we have him because we trust him. We know he's good. We look for our best players. They go reach out to their networks for the person we're looking for. So whether it's a head of SEO or a head of paid or a head of sales, and I'll give you the sales example. Uh, cause I had personal interaction with them. They'll be like, all right, let me go reach out to my network and say, who'd you work with that was the best salesperson ever in Spain or Madrid? All right. We don't pay any fees or anything like that, and they'll tell us who they ended up working with. And we asked a few people. And then when they give us the name, we look to who we know that's mutual connections because we ideally try to pull from within our industry. And then we ask them about them.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  And they'll tell them like, oh, so and so, they're amazing. They worked with me for five years and they always hit their number. They never once miss. So we're looking for cues like that. So then now we know they're good. We've of course already interviewed them at this point because we reached out, you know, got an introduction. Then let's say if it was a sales role, like I was in Madrid. Uh, or in Spain, but I was in Madrid. I was doing an event. They were there, they were invited. And then people on our team watch how they work the room. They're not working for us, yes. Who are they interacting with? Do other people know them? Are they well-connected, right? Are they known in the industry? Because if they're in sales, if they have the relationships, existing relationships, they're going to probably generate more revenue versus if they have no relationships.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  How are they doing in conversation? How are people interacting with them? Like, does it look positive from far away? Does it look like people just want to bounce away? Are they actually able to talk to people for a while and hold a conversation? So we're looking at all these kinds of things. And even with sales roles, they'll introduce me to people, not telling me that's the person that is there for the sales role. And then they'll be like, hey, Neil, what'd you think about so and so? And they'll ask me about a lot of random people. So I don't know which person, because I don't know what everyone in the room does.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  It blend in and I'm like, oh yeah, I like the person. They dress really cool. They're funny, very personal, smart. And I was like, that person's American. But it was shocking how they can speak Spanish. Like, yeah, they speak Spanish better than English. And I was like, oh, cool. They're like, yeah, that's the person we want to hire for our sales role. So we really put them through the ringer and we want to actually see how well they do. So same goes like with SEO. If we're trying to hire an SEO person in a specific region. Hey, who'd you work with, you know, so and so company that you would recommend for SEO? You go through it, you'll get some list of candidates, you get some introductions, you interview the ones. And then you can then start spotting the ones when you talk to people.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Who did really well when just the results were crappy and you had no choice but to try to figure out how to fix them. Right? Who didn't break under pressure when the business was doing terrible during downtimes and all that? So then you're starting to get a better understanding. Then we throw them into the fire before we hire them and we pay them for sample testers. It's like, hey, here's a customer, you know, we'll make up a customer. Like not actually one that we're working with. And we're like, this is a problem because it's not hard to identify marketing problems that companies have. And it's like, I need you to fix it. What would you do and how would you do it? And then you get to see them actually do it. Like, okay, cool. Now here's your team. The team is our internal people.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  You got to work with the client and convince them to make the changes. Go do it. And then our people role play like, no, I don't want to do this. And they act like a client and they have tons of fun because they get all the pushback from clients. So they know what they're already going to say. So they throw it at them, they see how they interact. And then we go from there. And then we also test them on how they work with our team and flows and CMSs and product managers and how they communicate. And they get paid for all this. And then if it works really well, then we'll hire. But you're just cutting down the amount of time that you spend with bad hires by just being super thorough like this. So your assessments, that process, how long does that typically take? Because that's

• 29:23Speaker 00

  Sounds like they do a written part and then they do the role play, right? That's that's two steps.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  It depends which role, uh, whether it's sales or whether it's a marketing position. Uh, but it typically takes somewhere in the months from us finding a candidate to getting them through the process and hiring them. Months, not a month, months.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Yep. Yeah. And so here's what I'll say. So I, I, I, going back to the juice box thing. So the amazing thing about it is it finds their personal email and it puts them in a sequence and it follows up with them. I think combined with the referral recruiting, and I think it's smart when you invite them to a room, because that just reminded me, a couple of years ago, we had the CEO candidate. And this was like during, um, Art Basel time in Miami. So it's very busy. So I brought this person around. This person could not work the room. This person was like, like timid in a corner. I'm like, oh, this person's gonna be a CEO. This ain't gonna work, right? The interviews, like everything went well, the assessments, but like that part was like a signal to me where I just, I, we, we couldn't do it. Um, but that, that, that, that's just, just to recap here. So guys, referral recruiting, that works. Um, still looking for two people with two promotions, especially when you use ju- juice box, that works as well.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  Um, and I think we, we both do the assessments and then you do the role plays as well. Um, and then am I missing anything?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Does me and we do most of this stuff for mid-level to higher level positions. If it's entry level positions.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  We do have criteria, but it's not this strict.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Okay. You can't, you can't make mistakes on your mid-level. Like if, if you have a marketing team and you're trying to hire a marketing manager or, you know, someone, a director of marketing, and they're terrible, your whole team underneath them is gonna be screwed and a lot of people are not gonna perform. It's too expensive of a mistake. You have an associate or intern and someone who is not that, uh, important of a role and they mess up, it's not gonna make that big of an impact. You can replace them, train them, whatever you need to do.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  That being said, um, Neil and I are gonna hit, hit stuff now and we're gonna make sure this uploads, but, um, hope you guys have a great weekend.