Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Illuminating the Dark Funnel About this episode Most B2B marketers can't act on their attribution data because 80% of website traffic gets misclassified as "direct." Chris Golec, CEO and founder of Channel99, explains how to solve the dark funnel problem that's costing companies millions in misallocated marketing spend. The discussion covers smart pixel implementation for view-through attribution, API integrations with LinkedIn and CRM systems to track account-level engagement, and using AI-powered decision engines to optimize marketing investment across channels based on cost-per-engagement metrics. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iHereEverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 70%. 70% of B2B marketing firms can't act on their marketing attribution data according to Six Sense. The struggle to connect business results is a blind spot that renders almost all of our attribution data useless. With more consumers leaning on zero-click AI experiences to find, research, even buy your products, the hidden customer journey is happening outside of your analytics and it's costing you pipeline, misallocating your budget, and crediting the wrong channels for the revenue you've actually earned. So how do you illuminate the dark funnel to understand which of your marketing investments are driving revenue? I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Chris Golec, the former founder of Demand
1:57 Speaker 04 Base and the current founder and CEO of Channel 99, a company that is solving marketing attribution challenges by revealing the source of three times the website visitors compared to your industry standards. And today, Chris is going to explain how to illuminate the dark funnel problem that is costing you millions in misattributed revenue. Chris, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
2:21 Speaker 05 Hi Ben, thanks for having me.
2:22 Speaker 04 Excited to have you here. Congratulations on the launch of a new company after the launch of a very successful company. You're a multi-time founder and you stayed in the space. Why aren't you on a beach somewhere?
2:36 Speaker 05 I just, I love the torture. I just can't get enough of it.
2:39 Speaker 04 You know, some of us are B2B marketers for life or founders in your case. Let's start off at the top here. I want you to walk me through how direct traffic is misattributed and why that breaks everything else in your marketing data.
2:53 Speaker 05 Sure. So just by definition, Google Analytics, all these different web analytics systems, take any traffic that does not come from a specific click and they throw in a bucket called direct. And another word or better word would probably be unknown. So it's all the traffic where people have just typed in the website. And it typically makes up 80% of a B2B marketer's website traffic. And so to me, if you're ignoring the largest signal on your website, you're going to get the wrong answer from any kind of measurement tool. So we felt like we have to solve for that before we can move on to make investment decision
3:38 Speaker 05 recommendations and leverage AI and do all these fancy things. But solving this direct or dark funnel is imperative.
3:46 Speaker 04 There's always, this is not a new problem, right? We've been looking at the direct traffic button, scratching our head for like 15 years since Google Analytics became popular. Is it a growing problem? Are we seeing more content or more visitors being counted as direct than before?
4:05 Speaker 05 Absolutely. I mean, you and I both probably click less on emails, don't click on ads. So this proportion of clickless engagement is just increasing and I can't imagine it going back.
4:20 Speaker 04 We have more zero click happening, mostly with the rise of AI and people coming direct. There's more information being given. The buyer journey is changing. So what's the methodology to actually make some sense out of this when your last click attribution is becoming less and less valuable? And that's mostly what Google Analytics is looking at. How do you start to figure out and actually do attribution in a way that makes sense?
4:47 Speaker 05 Well, I think it's it's all about uncovering that direct or unknown channel. Where is it really coming from? And the answer, it's not a simple one. It's it's a multifaceted approach where you can look at all the traffic coming from display ads where people see the ad and then come to the site. Some of that can be solved with tracking pixels where you look at, not tracking the user, but understanding this company just viewed the ad and then came to my website within 10 seconds. So you can kind of associate those impressions to website visits. In the case of organic social or LinkedIn, there are APIs now that we integrate with where you can look at
5:32 Speaker 05 the accounts that are reading my social posts and then coming to my website. And again, it's through timestamps that you can associate those. And the same thing for even email or events or meetings. You can look at the activities in the campaign object within the CRM system and associate activity on the site immediately following an email or a call. And so all that can get tied together. So the the short answer is it's a combination really of tracking pixels, which we call smart pixels, APIs, as well as ties into the CRM system. But when you put it all together,
6:16 Speaker 05 what you do find is this view through attribution is typically four or five times greater than the click through.
6:24 Speaker 04 It's funny, I was at eBay early in my career and one of the two teams that I was working on when I first started there was the display advertising team. And so we had this novel concept, nobody has ever heard of before. Of a view through attribution metric. When we pixel and somebody has viewed the ad, do they end up coming to the site and converting, oh, my God, it was mind blowing. Fifteen years down the road, we're still saying, you know, it's a great way to figure out if somebody actually was influenced by your ad. View through metrics. So again, what's old seems to be new here. Is there any change in, you know, we dropped a pixel on somebody's browser when they were served the ad.
7:09 Speaker 04 And then when they got to the site, we looked back and saw if that pixel was there and said, all right, that person must have been influenced by the ad. Has anything new happened with how view through is calculated?
7:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think we look at it from an account centric approach because we're not using cookies to track a person.
7:28 Speaker 05 And so our view through actually does three things. One, are who are the accounts viewing the ads? Number one. Number two, are they in the right target audience? Meaning is my, yeah, my ad technology provider serving the ads for the right companies? And then three is the view through piece. What's the actual engagement? And then roll that up. And one of the things we often find too is that quite often, display ads or organic social will be the first impression. But the next action that the person takes is they do paid search and then, and then come to the site. And everybody thinks it's paid search that's driving the first click.
8:13 Speaker 05 When in fact, it was some other source. So you need, you need to consider all these things together and really parse it out and reallocate to the proper.
8:23 Speaker 04 You've mentioned a couple of times that we look at the account level, not the personal level. Is that a privacy concern? You just don't want to be tracking individual users? Is there a reason why the account level is more of the focus? When the personal level seems like you can actually be much more targeted by things like job function, title, that sort of deal?
8:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think, you know, we sell in the big enterprise. You know, we're working closely with LinkedIn. So we, we always take a very privacy forward approach to everything we do. And, you know, we're trying to.
8:58 Speaker 05 Relate the attribution not to a person, but to a company. And when you look at the account, which is primarily a network IP, but we also look at the user agent, which gives us enough uniqueness to an individual without having to track the person.
9:18 Speaker 04 When you say the user agent, you know, I think of user agents and maybe this just being in the podcast spaces. Are they listening in Apple or are they listening in Spotify? Like that's it's essential. And you could look at the browser. Are you looking at a user agent getting down to the individual device level? Or what information?
9:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's a combination of operating system, resolution, computer type. So, you know, typically, not to get too geeky, but I can.
9:45 Speaker 04 It's the Martech Podcast, geek away.
9:47 Speaker 05 All right. So like, as far as network IP addresses, typically 30, 40 people will surf out of the same IP address within a corporation. And so when you add user agent on top of that, you get enough uniqueness to know that this is the person that just saw the ad and came to the site.
10:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, I guess that's really what I'm trying to get to is like, you know, for our production business, we want to target mid-market B2B buyers, you know, a hundred, 10 to $100 million and we're looking for the marketing decision makers. So VP, CMO level titles, right? There are individual people that we want at these organizations. There are 1,000 people that could work out as an organization. I want two or three of them. So, you know, obviously I want to understand attribution, but I don't care if the director of finance is seeing our ads. I want the head of marketing. So when you're at the account level, you seem to sacrifice some of that granularity.
10:45 Speaker 04 And that's kind of why I'm like, all right, you're triangulating an entire company. Is that what people really want?
10:53 Speaker 05 Whether they want it, that's what they do need was too many times people target their way out of business, meaning they're they think that they're just selling to one or two people. In fact, there's a buyer group and there's all these hidden buyers in legal and procurement and all these functions that if you're not selling to them early upfront and building awareness and trust, you're not going to be part of the sales cycle. It's just that's the way the world's going.
11:22 Speaker 04 So the buying group is is large and multifunctional. And I understand targeting the entire organization. And then we were talking about the view through metric and how well, social comes first. And that's generally the the top of funnel, the demand creation, let's call it. And then there's this mysterious research phase where everybody goes to AI and gets all of their information. And then maybe at the bottom, they're either coming direct or they're clicking a paid search ad. They're going through some PPC channel, which, hey, now we can give all the credit to, you know, your your AdWords campaign. How do you assign value to those different channels? Right? You're looking at a view through metrics to say, did the person see one of these multiple marketing
12:04 Speaker 04 channels we have? How do you figure out what gets them to move at least to the next part of the buyer journey or contribute to the conversion?
12:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, at a high level, you know, we look at the amount of spend that's invested in a particular channel and the amount of pipeline that gets influenced. And that's a very common kind of type influence to dollar invested. In B2B, it might take a while to get that kind of data metric. So what are the KPIs that that we like to use? And it allows us to look at vendors and channels kind of on an unbiased Apple's Apple's basis. And that is, what does it cost me to engage a target account on paid search, LinkedIn, or, you know, demand based display ads, or whatever it is. And that's always a very
12:56 Speaker 05 true leading indicator to pipeline impact. And when you look at that kind of KPI, the two kind of hidden things that people typically don't consider is Okay, out of all the companies that are being gauged, what percentage are from my addressable market? Who could actually be customers? That's one hidden factor. And that can range from 10% to 90%. And so the other piece is all this view through attribution. If I'm not looking at all the visits that LinkedIn is generating from all my organic social posts, I'm probably missing 70% of the engagement that LinkedIn is helping to drive.
13:41 Speaker 04 It scares me a little bit going by the, and this isn't exactly what you're saying, but if it costs more, it's more valuable. Right? Like your percentage of spend to engage a channel. Right? I want the cheapest engagement that has the maximum impact. You know, and I guess that leads me to, okay, I can go through display and put my banner ads in front of people and the cost per engagement or the the cost per view is a fraction of a cent. And then I can publish a podcast and the, try to drive somebody to the YouTube video and the cost per view is way, way higher. But those aren't exactly the same experience, right? Having somebody consume content and, you know,
14:25 Speaker 04 watch this video. It's 25 to 45 minute video. It's a lot different than, well, as they were scrolling through Facebook and ads showed up and they thumbed right by it. So how do you evaluate not only like what the cost per engagement is, but essentially the the weighted value of those engagements? And specifically which channels actually drive stronger intent?
14:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, in the world of intent, I always kind of, I put it in two camps. One, I'll call it explicit intent, where somebody read your social post or they're on your website or they're looking at your G2 profile. That's pretty explicit intent around your business.
15:08 Speaker 05 Ninety percent of the intent world, though, is people selling data about this company read an article about this, therefore they're in market. To me, that's implied and it's fabricated or manufactured intent. Unfortunately, that's the majority of the industry out there. And so we kind of dedicate our focus to what we call explicit intent. And it is things like, hey, three people from this company read the social post and then engaged on my website. They're in my target market. Really high intent signal.
15:48 Speaker 05 If somebody's going to take the time to read a longer article and then come to the site, that's way more interesting to me than somebody that just clicks on an ad.
15:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, to me, I think, you know, if I'm stack ranking, the time of engagement is the most important factor to understand how much knowledge they have about you or your content. And I am clearly biased as we record this video with high fidelity and production costs and all the things that go into creating a great podcast. But I think it makes a much bigger impact when somebody is sitting, watching a video or listening in audio only, and they're consuming minutes, if not, you know, an hour of content as opposed to a drive-by image with a tagline.
16:39 Speaker 04 So, you know, your media, to me, is the top of the funnel in terms of the maximum amount of engagement and the things that are scrolling, you know, are the least amount of engagement. Now, look, it's much harder to get somebody to watch a YouTube video than it is to scroll by your ad. What do you think is the sort of stacked ranked of impact of the various channels?
17:02 Speaker 05 Gosh, you know, I think it it all depends on who you're trying to sell or market to. And I, you know, I say this to every customer, every presentation, because we'll share a case study comparing the financial efficiency of paid search versus LinkedIn. And people think LinkedIn is premium priced, but we took 15 customers, did all the data, looked at their addressable markets, and lo and behold, for every thousand dollars, LinkedIn was four times more efficient than paid search at engaging potential customer. Period. Now, is that true for everybody? Absolutely not. It depends on who your target customer is.
17:44 Speaker 05 So getting to your question, I think it's always a combination of channels and mix, time, engagement. The beautiful thing now, if you have all your data harmonized and unified at the account level, all tied to CRM system, you can tie it right into ChatGPT and start asking questions and let it do the heavy work.
18:08 Speaker 04 It's funny, I was just about to ask you that. It's like, okay, so we now have this understanding of the value of channels in some capacity. And your system uses, you know, an account-based approach to go make sure that we are getting to the right people. How do you use AI or what are the methodologies now to make sense of the underlying attribution data? It seems like it's always been a mess and you can throw MMM at me and all these other acronyms like the the TLA word salad of like, well, here's the methodology. We have artificial intelligence. How are people using AI to actually understand attribution better than what we were doing before?
18:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, you know, it's it's funny, Ben, it's very timely. We we just. Created an MCP server, which is basically the way we connect all of our data to Copilot or Claude, or whatever it is that we're using. And literally just last week, I was on my phone and I just typed in, hey, if we want to generate $10 million of pipeline from the healthcare sector next year, what vendors and what should the mix be and how much should we spend? Within 12 seconds on my phone, everything was laid out, why it was laid out, all the key metrics, it was all foundational. And, you know, it was a lot of
19:27 Speaker 04 Timeout, timeout, hang on, hang on.
19:29 Speaker 05 It was crazy.
19:29 Speaker 04 Yes, in 12 seconds, your phone told you a strategy and a media plan. But is it right? Like, it's always going to respond with a coherent sounding answer. Why do you have faith in it?
19:46 Speaker 05 Hmm, because it's based on how much I'm paying to engage a target account from that sector. It's, a lot of it's fact-based versus the converse of that is, okay, I'm going to have my team go away for a month and come back with a bunch of opinions that are based on who they're friends with at what vendors and all these other things. So to me, one is, I can trust in 12 seconds and it's a way better starting point that's fact-based than what we've been doing historically. And it's just going to get better and better. Of course, we get to just keep improving the models.
20:26 Speaker 04 Yes, I read an article yesterday, I forgot who wrote it, about how we've passed the tipping point for engineers and they are now no longer useful and AI is coming for your job next. One of the like, the big doomer articles of like, artificial intelligence is becoming Skynet.
20:44 Speaker 05 Well, I, I do think, one, one thing, and obviously this is timely as well, like, a year from now. You know, are people going to be logging into five different systems? Or are they going to be their primary interaction is going to be with Gen AI? And everybody's going to be plugging all their different data and systems in. And that's going to be your primary interaction point.
21:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, I can't believe how much time I've spent in my computer's terminal over the last month. And so we used to use these beautiful, well-designed web apps that had these wonderful experiences and were, you know, sort of filtering out all the stuff we don't need to see. And now I'm in this like ugly text box doing all sorts of coding. God knows what happens to all of our jobs over the next six months to a year. But my hope is we can migrate back to some sort of a visual design aesthetic as we're using these new tools. And maybe there is a centralized tool, but it seems like artificial intelligence is dragging us to the root of development
21:50 Speaker 04 as opposed to something that is easy for us to consume, which I hope that we sort of level back into a place that makes our jobs a little easier, or at least honestly, a better user experience.
22:01 Speaker 05 Well, I think it's, I think you'll see in future versions, it's going to go from, you know, today's primarily text and tables. Charts are coming, interactive charts are coming, like it's just going to get better and better. So why go out and build a software company that has a bunch of charts and tables? And I can tell you all of our large enterprise customers, they want all our unique data and insights. They don't want another dashboard. They just don't.
22:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yes, there's a unification of how we interpret all of our data and our systems are all blending together with this fortunately, hopefully, single source of truth that has good judgment. And I think we're getting to the point now where we're, we actually have artificial intelligence that can make reasonable judgments on what we mean. And so we don't have to be as specific. I still have questions about how marketers evaluate and compare channels. It seems like we've got a unified system that is coming with artificial intelligence. But when I look at the various advertising channels, you know, where I spend most of my time in Google and in Meta and. They're all evaluating and grading their own homework, right?
23:13 Speaker 04 So when you look at the various platforms, they all take credit for anything that they, you know, they sat next to in class and they said, well, if that person got an A, then I got an A. How do you make sense as you're thinking through evaluation and attribution of the data that's coming in when you know that the platforms are all trying to grab as much credit as they can?
23:33 Speaker 05 Well, that's part of the whole premise of having kind of unbiased KPIs. And, you know, just go back to my days at Demandbase when we launched this, you know, B2B advertising technology and customers were judging us based on cost per click. And we were like, well, we're driving so much more engagement, not getting credit for it. And we came up with this metric called LIFT. So if you were going to advertise to 100 companies, we looked at the traffic that you were getting from those 100 companies and then the increase or lift from those 100 companies during the campaign. It kind of held water, but a lot of people, it was just very non-scientific.
24:17 Speaker 05 And the answer to that is it's all viewed through attribution. And now that can all be substantiated and proven for the most part.
24:26 Speaker 05 And, but people want a third party or a trusted independent source. And that's kind of where we come in on a lot of these things.
24:35 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:35 Speaker 05 So.
24:36 Speaker 04 The last question I have for you here was, one of the things that I noticed when I was looking through Channel 99's website is you're able to identify more site visitors than the industry average. I think it's like three times, 60, 70% of site visitors, you're able to identify them on an account level. Why is and how is that possible?
24:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, so.
25:02 Speaker 05 We basically use a network solution where we have multiple sources of providers. So think of it as a waterfall effect of using sources to detect bot traffic. And then we use public registry data and then we have APIs out to multiple providers. And by doing that, one of the things I learned that actually surprised me, to be honest, Ben, I assumed that there was a lot of overlap between the different ABM companies. The reality is they've kind of come up with their own unique methodologies to uncover.
25:40 Speaker 05 You know, Ben is, might be coming through Comcast, but that IP address is associated with his, his company and we kind of peel back that veil. And so Demandbase might have one approach, SixSense might have an approach, HubSpot ClearBoutbit might have an approach. And we combine multiple providers, you get something much greater.
26:05 Speaker 04 It's the sum of all parts. All right, Chris, I want to move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple of questions about your career attribution, demand generation. We're going to spin the wheel and see what, see what comes up. Are you ready?
26:18 Speaker 05 Sure.
26:18 Speaker 04 All right, question number one, we're going to talk a little bit about motivation. You sold your first company for $380 million and pioneered an entire category with Demandbase. Why are you here and what stopped you from retiring to your lake house in Michigan?
26:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, I don't have a lake house in Michigan and it's really cold there. But I do like to go there in the summer. It's a beautiful place. You know, it's just passion for the, the industry. And, you know, when I started Demandbase, the initial vision of the company was to be a supply chain solution for marketers. And so that's effectively what Channel 99 is. So it's a little bit of unfinished business. But I love building companies, the people, the culture. I love seeing like employees that become best friends and go on, they might go on to different companies and that's pretty gratifying for me.
27:15 Speaker 04 And so for most of us, you know, we're on the other side, not having had this giant windfall. And so we're still earning and, and working with A, because we have to, and B, because we also have something to prove. After the exit, How did that turn? You're obviously working. You said you have unfinished business, but it's not about the result for you. So, you know, I want a little bit more about the motivation. And again, like-
27:44 Speaker 05 It's the result for the people I work with. It's, you know, a result for families. You know, there's a lot more motivation than just a financial one.
27:54 Speaker 05 So, you know, I'd also say whatever you think somebody made out of something, cut it in half.
28:01 Speaker 04 We never talk about the taxes after you sell your company.
28:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's what my mother would say, right? The one about the taxes, yeah.
28:08 Speaker 04 All right. My next question, I want to talk about owning your mistakes. What's the biggest mistake you made building a company culture at Demandbase? And what are you doing differently at Channel 99?
28:20 Speaker 05 So I would say that was one of the things we did really well at Demandbase, but the mistake was underestimating how much you really have to invest in it to be successful at it. And the reason I say that is, you know, over the years at Demandbase, we became a top 20 place to work in San Francisco for like eight or nine years in a row. But it didn't come easy. It's not about free snacks. You have to invest a lot in the people, the training, how you recruit, how you pay people, how transparent you are. There's doing philanthropic activities. So there's a lot that goes into it. I underestimated what that would be when we-
29:04 Speaker 05 because I set out pretty early, like I want to be one of the best places to work so we can hire and retain the greatest people available to us.
29:13 Speaker 04 What do you think makes a great place to work?
29:17 Speaker 05 Well, it's, it's, you know, it's a common theme and thread in the types of people that you hire.
29:25 Speaker 05 For me, I always, I'm more of a collaborative type leadership style. We always did a lot of very transparent meetings where everybody knew what was going on. There wasn't like anything hidden. And one of the secrets, I think, for our culture is what I discovered that brought us all together as a company was- Instead of doing just team events, we'd always do a team event around something philanthropic. And that really tied everybody together across department, different people. And so that was thematically was always something really important to me and actually everybody that worked at the company.
30:04 Speaker 04 And an occasional free snack every once in a while and never hurt anybody.
30:07 Speaker 05 I'll get you a bag of chips. Yeah.
30:08 Speaker 04 All right. Underrated or overrated, is LinkedIn an underrated or overrated marketing channel?
30:16 Speaker 05 It's underrated, but I would also caveat that it also depends on who is your customer. Cause there might be certain industries that aren't active on LinkedIn and it may not make sense. But let the numbers, you know, speak for themselves.
30:32 Speaker 04 All right. So let's, let's pivot it down or click in and B2B marketing LinkedIn. You're saying underrated. Why?
30:43 Speaker 05 Because a lot of people don't consider all the engagement that's being driven from LinkedIn because it's all sitting in the direct bucket. Back to the very first question, and they don't realize that their number one channel for driving or influencing pipeline is organic social and they just don't know it.
31:04 Speaker 04 I'm glad you said organic social because when you post on LinkedIn, you tend to get some organic reach. There's also the tools where you can do thought leadership ads and sponsored posts and all sorts of other fun tools to get your content there. Is LinkedIn primarily an organic growth channel or do you think that's what makes it effective? Or can you use the promotional tools to help get your content out there just as effectively?
31:29 Speaker 05 Well, I think, yeah, I think it's a combination of both. Right? One of the things that we kind of discovered was, you know, a lot of CMOs and executives will do thought leadership content. And they care a lot more about pipeline influence than they do about comments and thumbs ups and likes. That's usually what they're getting. And when you can show that. Gosh, it really had a huge impact on pipeline last quarter. You can't tie it to the member level, but you can tie it at the account level.
32:02 Speaker 04 All right. Last question for you. A little bit about the AI hype cycle. You've been through multiple waves of technology, working in mostly B2B tech for 25 years. Is the AI hype in martech justified, or are we just in another bubble like the mobile or dot com era?
32:21 Speaker 05 I do think it's justified, and I do think we'll see more transformation over this next year than we have in the last 10 years. Just because I don't think it's, we're going to have this proliferation of SaaS products and interfaces. And I think the interoperability of all these different data sources, you'll be able to create, launch, optimize campaigns right from your general Gen AI solution as people start plugging in to Gen AI, it's all going to be interoperable.
32:57 Speaker 04 It's dizzying to me, and I agree. I am, this is the tsunami, right? The, the, the, the previous, the iPhone was a huge and, and mobile marketing to me was a huge transformative shift, but it took 20 years to roll out. Like, this is hitting us so fast, and it's the pace of change that concerns me. Not that we haven't gone through change before, right? Like, technology normally takes a long time to roll out. It is happening so quickly, and the models are getting so good, and we're able to create so much software. And we're seeing it in the stock market now with the SaaS companies all seemingly tanking. Who knows whether they'll rebound or not?
33:39 Speaker 04 That, to me, creates the, the anxiety and the concern is the pace, not necessarily the actual technology.
33:46 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, I mean, we have complete visibility into the efficiency of B2B marketing spend. And I don't know if it would surprise you that 75% of the dollars go to marketing and targeting, reaching, engaging companies that will never buy anything. So the upside is massive.
34:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, we definitely have a little fat to trim. I also think that the concern for me is there's a lot of people that are doing jobs that potentially become redundant and the reskilling, I feel it already. Like I mentioned, you know, early in our conversation, I'm spending time in my computer's terminal, not thinking about marketing or in front of a camera or, you know, dealing with clients. I'm coding stuff.
34:36 Speaker 05 Yeah.
34:36 Speaker 04 And in languages I don't understand because it can be translated into English. And so like the skill transformation is happening. It can be painful. It's great to be able to learn and some people are going to get super wealthy trying to figure this out and being a first mover advantage. There's going to be people that are laggards that I think are going to suffer. I definitely, and going back to the original question, I am of the camp that this is a tsunami. This is the big one, using a San Francisco metaphor. You know, earthquake jokes are no fun around here. But like, the world is shaking. The ground under us is moving and, you know, hopefully we all end up with beachfront property.
35:15 Speaker 05 Well, I think people, it's upon them to educate themselves and figure out like, how can I really leverage what this stuff is doing to benefit my company?
35:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, Chris, congratulations on your past success, the success you're having with the current company. I think it's really interesting what you're doing and rethinking a problem that marketers have had for a really long time, understanding if their dollars are actually driving revenue in a coherent fashion. So thanks for coming on and being my guest.
35:44 Speaker 05 I appreciate it, Ben. Thank you.
35:45 Speaker 04 All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to Chris Golec, the CEO and founder of Channel 99 for joining us. If you'd like to contact Chris, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com, or you can visit his company's website at channelen99.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed next week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
36:44 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit ihereverything.com.
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