Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Intent Data Is Dead. Alpha Signals Aren’t. About this episode Traditional intent data fails to predict actual buying behavior. Nick Zeckets, Chief Fire Starter at Smoke Signals AI, explains how signal-based demand generation replaces outdated intent tracking methods. He outlines strategies for capturing alpha signals through AI-powered content engagement, building custom HubSpot workflows that activate on meaningful buyer interactions, and measuring pipeline generation instead of vanity 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 a host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 25%. Only 25% of B2B companies use intent data, according to Landbase. 96% of businesses that implement intent data reported increased sales and ROI. The gap represents billions in missed pipeline. Our problem isn't the lack of data. Buying signals are hiding in plain sight, while some marketers still obsess over vanity metrics like email open rates, MQL counts, what are we living in 1996? If you're operating with pre-AI frameworks, you're confusing revenue generation with engagement theater. So how do you move beyond legacy vanity metrics to capture real-time buying signals? I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Nick Zeckets, the Chief Firestarter at Smoke
2:00 Speaker 04 Signals AI, an AI-first HubSpot agency that helps B2B companies generate, capture and activate buying signals to measure pipeline, not vanity metrics. And today, Nick is going to share his process for redesigning demand generation from the ground up for the age of AI. Nick, welcome to the Martech Podcast.
2:19 Speaker 05 Thank you very much for having me.
2:21 Speaker 04 Excited to have you here. What a privilege. You know, every once in a while, you see someone from across the room, your eyes meet, and you just know that they're your person. And when we were introduced by Mark Serkan, a mutual friend of ours, I felt that way about you. I hope the feeling was mutual. And I can't wait to hear a little bit about your demand generation process. Walk me through moving beyond MQL, SQL frameworks to realtime activation. What's the world look like today?
2:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's wild. I think it looks more honest than it has in a really long time, right? I think we've been chasing these vanity metrics. And I think a little bit of that discussion is really interesting in as much as I think it craps on marketing. But I think the problem is that it was all marketing had. Because it didn't exist really as a function. And then it finally started getting a seat at the table. And then when it got a seat at the table, it was asked to prove its value and worth.
3:25 Speaker 05 And MQLs and SQLs were all we had, right? And so we built systems around those types of behaviors. But what's really interesting is that if you kind of look pre-marketing as it exists today with marketing automation platforms, everything else. If you scaled, you hired a ton of salespeople and a ton of SDRs and BDRs and roles like that, right? Humans who would pick up phones and write emails. And the more of those humans you had, the more of those phone calls and emails that you could kind of create and send. And with AI, I think what's happening is that we're finally in a place, and I would say, you know, kind of advanced orchestration goes into that bucket too. But we're finally in a place where the one-to-one work.
4:12 Speaker 05 That frontline sellers have been great at for a long time, when they are good at their jobs, mind you. So this is not all of them. This is those who are really good, is now something that we can kind of extract and extrapolate up to the top of the funnel and our activities that are there. So I just think we're living in a completely new world. It's really exciting.
4:36 Speaker 04 I want to bag on the old way that we used to do it for a second because, you know, how do we count whether marketing is successful in B2B? It's an MQL. We're talking 10 years ago now. You know, sales, SQLs, and how are we able to convert them? The QL part is bullshit, right? It's, it's a judgment based on the marketing team's decision on whether this is good or this is bad. If I want more of them, I just loosen my judgment criteria. If I want them to have a higher conversion rate, I restrict my judgment criteria. Same thing with sales qualified leads, right? So it's like, the volume of people that we're counting are how many we want to count. And to me, that process was always broken. Now we're
5:21 Speaker 04 in a, you know, a signal age or era when we talk about what makes a difference to marketers. So how are you distinguishing between signals that are actually going to drive revenue, which is what we should all be shooting for, and just vanity metrics that look good?
5:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, my God. I mean, that's the question, right?
5:44 Speaker 05 When we started working with customers, we have kind of an Occam's razor question. And it's, and we talk to sales first, right? It's, okay, you're sellers. Who's your best seller? Who are your best, you know, two, three, four sellers? And in a conversation with them, the question that we love to ask is, what is it that you hear in a discovery call that your gut instantly tells you, holy crap, I'm going to get this deal, right? I haven't even started pitching yet. I haven't started asking any of my discovery questions, you know, or maybe I'm just getting into discovery. But this customer, this prospect said something to me. And whatever it was that they said, I want to know what that
6:28 Speaker 05 thing is where you light up and you come out of that meeting going, yeah, I've got this one in the bag. Because it turns out that somebody visiting your website
6:40 Speaker 05 Downloading some ebook, right, showing up to a webinar probably doesn't actually mean anything. It probably communicates awareness, brand familiarity. If you were to email them or reach out, you have a higher likelihood that they might open something if they stuck around for the whole webinar, or came to your field event, or saw you in a booth at an event, right? Those are reasons that you want to kind of invest in trust, right? But if you want to know that someone's ready to buy, it can't be some generalized off-the-shelf, "Yeah, you know, they're hiring some people, or they're doing X, or they're doing Y." It has to be something truly unique. And we now live in a time where the data that
7:25 Speaker 05 you can get on organizations, oftentimes, just by being really thoughtful about how to use scrapers, right? We're not even talking about buying data assets, many of which are out there in the market and charging an arm and a leg for access to data that's frankly free, right? It's how you figure out where the information lives. And then what do you do about it, right? And the what do you do is the other piece of the puzzle that I think has been missing for a long time with data.
7:53 Speaker 04 So I think of what you're talking about as the difference between segmentation, right? How do I define who is in my sandbox? Where am I going to play? I only want businesses with more than $10 million of revenue because they can pay for my service, or somebody that is hiring for this type of role because they're already self-selecting, they've identified this pain. And the flip side of that sort of filtering and segmentation is what are their buying signals? Like, yes, somebody is in my ICP, but when they get in front of sales and they're like, "I can't stand this problem," and they bang their hands on the table, you're like, "Oh, my God, they're buying from me." Like, what gets the salesman's
8:38 Speaker 04 heart rate going up? What is the buying signals?
8:41 Speaker 05 Yeah.
8:42 Speaker 04 How do you identify those? Like, how do you quantify or qualify, like,
8:48 Speaker 04 They want me.
8:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, right. Yeah, it's a really good question. So you make a good distinction. I think a lot of go to market has started with ideal customer profile, ICP, right? And and created audiences and then gone after them, right?
9:11 Speaker 05 It's wildly inefficient. It's better than throwing spaghetti against the wall and telling your message to anybody and everybody, many of whom would never buy what you have. But the vast majority of even your ideal customer profile just isn't a place to do it, right? They may not be problem aware. They may not be in the shit, right? Experiencing the pain.
9:31 Speaker 04 They don't know you.
9:33 Speaker 05 That's 100% right, which by the way, always kind of brings me back to again, and we talked about it for a second before, the idea of trust, right? Like, one, they have to fit the ICP. And and almost no one I've ever spoken to has an ICP that's tight enough. I think they're all about two or three degrees away from the degree of tightness that you really want to be. Second is you have to have brokered some degree of trust. If somebody's really in the shit and they don't know who you are, I'm not saying don't reach out. But I think trust is, and I think a lot of marketing teams kind of use the word brand. But it's been difficult to quantify. And we're starting to get into a place where we can actually quantify those things, right? We can know who's engaged with our LinkedIn posts.
10:15 Speaker 05 We can have a really interesting idea of who we've activated for field marketing. We can start to build all those things up. And I and I don't think that it works the way that lead scoring methodologies work, right? I don't think it works in the way that attribution models work. Attribution models suggest them going to this event has this much influence on them having bought the thing. It's not that it doesn't have influence. It's just it's not actually influencing the purchase. It's influencing trust. Influencing the purchase, the fact that I was in really deep crap. And yes, I made the decision to go with you guys because I know and I like you, right? But they're kind of like, they're, these are different planes of consideration.
11:00 Speaker 05 So I have a whole set of gripes about whether or not the attribution market at large is worth anybody's time at all. I'm sure people will fight me in the comments. You know, I think when we think about signal, I'll give you an example. So we had a customer that was in the automated, you know, software QA space. Right. So end to end quality assurance testing for software. Lots of things about that that are really, really hard, really great product. And we actually looked at public GitHub repos, which shockingly, a lot of companies have have public repos and looked to see what testing methodologies
11:43 Speaker 05 they were using and how long they were running for. Because what we could find is that if the time that that was running was fairly extended, it actually indicated that they probably weren't able to test a lot of their end to end product processes. Right. So by getting that information, we could turn around and say, hey, our guess is this might be true for you. The rate at which the response was, yes, you're right, was 90%. Right. Now, that's a tough signal to get. Right. And you have to really be super thoughtful about it. But I think what is happening is that if you step back and you think about where your
12:26 Speaker 05 customers spend their time, where they commit and execute their work, how their work is represented. SEC filings could be a place. FOIA, you know, RFP document discussions and town hall councils. I mean, this stuff's all on the internet. Right. And it, but it's not in your average kind of like quote unquote intent or signal data provider. And that's what we really kind of harp on is that the bespoke signal is hypercritical. And most businesses, the good news is they don't have 27 that they should be going after. They have like three or five or whatever. There's not a lot of them. So it's harder.
13:10 Speaker 05 But once you get it, you're kind of there, right? You've reached the promised land in a lot of ways.
13:15 Speaker 04 In my notes here, I have a question to ask you about alpha signals. Is that, is that your term? Is that an industry term?
13:22 Speaker 05 I've been saying it. I'm sure someone else has said it before. Neither alpha nor signal are unique terms within go to market, but it is a way that we talk about what we do.
13:31 Speaker 04 I'm giving you credit for it. Right, the alpha signal, which is the difference from I went to Sixth Sense and bought some sort of fabricated intent signal. Right, somebody else is telling me there's intent as opposed to I am building a custom signal, trigger, pain point. Like, let's call that an alpha signal. Your example of there's a QA vendor that is looking at how long it takes for you to process, whatever it is. Right, that's, that's something that's custom and specific to you. We're in the age of AI.
14:07 Speaker 05 Yep.
14:07 Speaker 04 How do we identify the alpha signals as opposed to rely on like the stale intent signals? How do you find and cultivate and build your own alpha signal?
14:18 Speaker 05 Well, I'll be self-serving for a second. We actually built a free app that does this. So it's gtmos smokesignals.ai, totally free. Anybody can use it. And it's got some of our proprietary approach to how it is that you figure this stuff out and think about them. But a lot of it is, is just trying to become as deeply aware of all the data that's in your space as you possibly can.
14:47 Speaker 05 It is shocking how many companies have and organizations have APIs. There is almost nothing on a company's website that you can't programmatically gather with scrapers.
15:01 Speaker 05 And if you know what your ICP is.
15:04 Speaker 05 Telling a scraper to go and look for X, Y, and Z on all of those companies' websites once a week is actually pretty easy to do, right? You got the list of websites because you have the list of accounts and you're asking it to go find a couple of, you know, things. And because AI is really good at saying, well, I don't care how this site is organized versus that one. I'm just looking for something generally that is this. It'll find it, right? The degree of resolution is incredibly high and it does that really well. But there's a thought process to it. And like I said, the best thing to kind of do is to talk to the sales organization and say, what is the thing that comes up in discovery that lets you know that this is a deal?
15:43 Speaker 05 And then just try to find a data proxy for that insight. And it is very rare that there isn't one. Now, that doesn't mean that it's a like for like, right? Sometimes you need several things to be true, right? So let's say for us, for example, we have a couple of ICPs, one of which is an early stage organization. They have a single marketing leader on the team. She's probably fairly senior. They've just raised a round somewhere between four and $10 million. They're north of a million bucks in revenue, so product's got some stability to it and it knows what it's doing in the market.
16:28 Speaker 05 And all of a sudden, this leader, she's got this mandate to grow, right? We have to go look at SEC filings for Form Ds, right? To understand about the funding.
16:39 Speaker 04 Sorry, what's a Form D?
16:41 Speaker 05 A Form D is the official document that you have to file if you raise money as a private company.
16:46 Speaker 04 Okay.
16:47 Speaker 05 Remarkable, but it's in the SEC, right? The SEC is a government institution. That's our data because we pay taxes, right? So really fascinating, but then we have to marry that with whether or not there's a marketing leader within the organization, right? Because if there's not... We find that that's not a great fit for us, right? We need an internal partner in order to be successful on behalf of our customers, right? So we have to have a couple of things that are true. And then we go and kick off an analysis of the company's website. The average deal size has to be large. AI is great at scraping and understanding and extrapolating that information, right? Which indicates it's a fairly complex sale.
17:31 Speaker 05 These are places where we know that we do well, right? If they were PLG, they don't keep going through the process. It's over. We don't work with that process. We don't have any skill sets. And it's not that I don't think that it works. I think it's just very hard and very expensive and we suck at it. So we just don't touch it. But, but those are the types of things. It's oftentimes not a single metric. It can be two or three things combined, right? That kind of help you really understand that you're in the middle of a really good op.
18:00 Speaker 04 So I'm going through this process of rebuilding my GTM for I Hear Everything's, the production company I run. And the only thing I could think of is like, we talked about what are the signals? We, you know, box the universe there. Marketing and technology companies, we're looking for the marketing leaders. We want them to be 10 to 250 million dollars of revenue. So pre-IPO, most likely, you know, have a marketing team big enough to be able to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a podcast a year. And that's great. That sort of gives us the segmentation. We've, we have our ICP.
18:38 Speaker 04 And I'm struggling between this notion of, well, the world was like focused on cold outreach and just hit messages to people and send emails. And I get them 10 times a day. I flag them as spam and move on. I don't read any of those messages. So why would I send those? So we're trying to move towards this methodology, not of cold outreach, but to warm outreach, right? Let me push content to that universe that I'm interested in and see who engages in that content and when they engage, then now I know that they are aware of me. I know they're in my ICP. And then I start doing some research to try to figure out, are they, uh, do they
19:20 Speaker 04 have pain, right? Do they have a branded podcast? How's that branded podcast performing? And so like, to me, there's this difference between your filtering mechanism that we talked about before, are they in your ICP? Who are you pushing your content to? And then, and then I'm starting to think about, all right, warm outreach instead of cold to start to drive awareness and sort of filter to see who's most likely going to resonate with my message. The whole second half of this thing is really confusing to me.
19:49 Speaker 05 Sure.
19:50 Speaker 04 Great. So now I know somebody that's got a branded podcast that I looked and I could look at things like, how often do they publish? That's public data. Uh, how many YouTube views do they get? I, there's a tool, Riffonic, that's how many podcast listeners do they get? It's a proxy. It's not perfect. And I've got all this information. So what do you do with that? I, let's call that my alpha signal. It's their podcast's performance, or what I think is their podcast's performance. How do you figure out what is the right message and delivery method to actually get somebody to not just be like, oh, here, here's another cold email, but here's somebody I should actually talk to?
20:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, these are great points. And there's a few things. So we like to take an audience like that and figure out everything that they're talking about in public, right? So what are they saying in their LinkedIn posts? And if you're running a podcast and you're in marketing, you're probably an active LinkedIn user, right? So what are you talking about there? Have they presented at conferences lately, et cetera, et cetera? And, and doing a little bit of a mapping exercise to see whether or not there's a disconnect between the things that they're talking about and maybe some of the podcasts. I think even absent the podcast, right? Hey, okay, this company fits those other elements.
21:12 Speaker 05 They have a marketing team. They don't have a podcast. They have a CEO who's really active on LinkedIn, who has a really strong follower base. Oh, my God, this is such an incredible opportunity to exploit the power of a podcast in a scenario like this. Like, I think of, you know, the CEO of Chili Piper, she's incredibly active on LinkedIn. They run field events that are very well-regarded, like unbelievable field events. They have no podcast. I think that's insane. I think that's a gap for them. It's like such a great opportunity for Chili Piper to have a podcast. And I think people would listen, right?
21:54 Speaker 05 I think people would listen. They would listen to her. She's amazing. You know, and in a scenario like that, my activation would be ingesting all of her LinkedIn posts and saying, here, I think, are your first 10 episodes. And then using the episode information and then doing a dynamic search against LinkedIn to go find who the guests are to help her have those conversations and saying, this is the next 10 episodes, right? Like, let's go get these 10 people. These people are ICPs. Some of them might already even be your customers, right? They've been talking about the same stuff that you're talking about. I love this post where you talked about that. This would make for a great pod. I've got nine more ideas. Do you want to talk about it?
22:39 Speaker 05 That's a provocative email to the CEO, right? And I think she either forwards it to her head of marketing, or she takes the call herself. My point being is that I think one of the things that we break when we think about Signal is that we start at Signal rather than starting at Sales Execution. And that's why I say it's like, what's the conversation that's happening with Sales? Because if it starts there, the question you're asking becomes a lot easier.
23:10 Speaker 04 I want to double click on that. We're starting with Signal, not, I think you said, Sales Activation. Explain that to me.
23:21 Speaker 05 Look, I think Six Sense's concept of intent data is a waste of everybody's time. I think, and it's not even theirs, right? It's Bombor's, they license Bombor's data, and sorry to the Bombor guys. Same thing, I don't, I don't think it means very much. In the universe of Signal, I don't think it means very much, but you know what they did really well?
23:41 Speaker 04 Markets?
23:43 Speaker 05 Well, yeah, for sure. Their marketing team crushed, they were absolutely phenomenal. But they created sales activation as actually the primary thrust. Right? It was an organizational philosophy for sales organizations. Right? Much like account-based marketing is an organizational philosophy for sales and marketing organizations that are saying, I want to go after a set number of accounts. Turns out, if you just get people to focus, even if the focus resolution isn't that great at the data level, but you're just telling people to do a better job on fewer things, outcomes are better.
24:25 Speaker 05 So people literally have been paying $200,000 a year to tools like Six Sense to just basically financially kick them into focus. And if that's all they do, I actually tell you, it's worth the money. Right? Now, I think that that is the VP of Sales and VP of Marketing, I think it's their job in order to pull that stuff off. That's an alignment problem, it's a strategic problem, it's a cultural problem, it's not a tooling problem by and large. But they started with a sales interface. And so, one of the reasons that I think so many of the new Signal-based tools have an automated email function against them, you know, the quote-unquote AISDRs. Right? The Qualifides and the AISDR and all these other guys, LoveNext, etc.
25:10 Speaker 05 The reason that they have the automated email tools is because it is the, the sales activation kind of automated, right? Now, it turns out that they're all crapping the bed because A, their signals are vague and they're off the shelf, which is there are too many of them. It means you're sending too many emails, which means you are then getting crapped on in terms of email deliverability and you start to move that system too hard and it ends up, sure, for a month or two, yielding a new set of 50 or 60 or 80 or even 100 meetings a month.
25:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, low hanging fruit.
25:44 Speaker 05 Exactly. And then it starts to go down the road, right? And it's the same thing as what Sixth Sense was giving you, except at higher volume because there's no gap between the signal and the email output, right?
25:57 Speaker 04 I guess the struggle that I have in my head is even if I have a rich alpha signal, how do I differentiate the messaging that I'm sending so it doesn't appear to be the same crap cold outreach? And you're saying, well, be more targeted and send less volume. But to me, it's like if I emailed the, you use the example, the CEO of Chili Piper was like, hey, you should start a podcast. Guess what's happening to that email?
26:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
26:28 Speaker 04 It's going to spam, right? Like, cause I, I guess the question is like the, the delivery part is one, the mechanism, it's email and it's LinkedIn, those are, are delivery vehicles. But then there's a messaging component of like, how do I, now that I have this rich signal, cut through the clutter?
26:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, I, I think the signal is the message, right? If the resolution is good enough, the signal is the message, right? Saying, oh, I know that you just hired somebody. So, fuck, okay. And then like, and so what? Right? Or, hey, you just got funding.
27:03 Speaker 04 If you have money, can I have some of it?
27:07 Speaker 05 Right, exactly. What an insane concept, right? Um, I think there's two things that are really important. One, again, if the resolution on the, on, on the signal is so clear, right? To go back, it is, I'm not saying, give me a hundred grand a year for a podcast. I'm saying, here's your first episode, here's your first guest, and, and here's why I think that's true. I've got another nine episode and guest ideas.
27:40 Speaker 05 We're talking about value-add content. What I'm doing is I'm informing your strategy. And if you do it, if you do it really well, you can take that signal data, aggregate it, and actually turn it into content.
27:53 Speaker 04 So play it out with me here. The email to Chili Piper. Hey, I've put together the list of your first 10 podcast guests. Is my email title, "Bob Smith Should Be Your First Podcast Guest"?
28:08 Speaker 05 Maybe. I think that stuff is where, I think that's where classic marketing skillsets still have a ton of value. Now, we here, we create psychographic profiles on prospects at the person level, which informs how a subject line gets constructed for an individual or the body copy gets constructed for an individual, but the core message comes out of the signal.
28:32 Speaker 04 All right. Now, tell me that in English. Psychographic profiles at the individual level. You're finding out what individual people respond to?
28:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, exactly. So when you think about things like age and gender to some degree, but titles, the words that they use when they post on LinkedIn, the way that they've constructed their about me sections, the way that they talk about their jobs and the companies that they work at, the things that they've said online, presentations that they may have given, we use that information to understand, who is this human? Right? Like, how do they like to be spoken to? Now, we don't know it for a fact. We're projecting off of psychographics, but it turns out that there are psychographic models out there that allow you to get a good idea of, hey, this person likes it short and no BS. This
29:23 Speaker 05 person likes color and, you know, forward-looking excitement. This person likes something that's incredibly pragmatic, right? You can, you can figure this stuff out. So some people like provocative, you know, one...
29:38 Speaker 05 Word email subject lines, right? And other people, it's like, you know, the email subject line is Bob or whatever. There was a guy, there's a guy who has a, a company. And he had a subject line that was just potato. And it was, I thought it was so funny. I thought it was so funny. And he said, it was one of those subject lines. We did it in a mass outbound. And he's like, our open rate was awesome. And we surveyed some of the people that didn't open it. We actually did the work. And the people who didn't open it, they're like, I have no idea what that is. I'm not opening an email called potato. Right? The people who did open it were like, potato? What, what, who sent you an email that says potato? Right? Like, now I have to open the email.
30:23 Speaker 05 And I loved it so much. I thought it was such a clever approach. But it's a really great example that I thought that was hysterical. The second I saw the email subject line, I thought it was so funny and I opened it. All right? But there are other people for whom that just didn't work. But that's the kind of human I am. Right? And so there's some testing there. There's still a lot of cleverness. I think subject lines are still a place where copywriters have a lot of opportunity to add a ton of value. Cause I don't think the L L M's have figured it out yet. But the body saying that I have figured out that this is true. God, your audience is massive. Your opportunity is huge. And in fact, it's so obvious to me, I've already figured out what the first 10 episodes are.
31:08 Speaker 05 Right? It's like, oh, I would, okay. Like, this is interesting, but the content itself is, is designed around this truth about this woman and her audience and her being public and knowable. And if you were to take her last, say, 10 LinkedIn posts and put them into Claude and be like, based upon this, give me a psychographic profile and give me a suggestion on an email subject line. It would give you something very, very interesting. Right? Very useful. Like you, you don't have to go down a million layers of crazy data and tooling and build a bunch of shit. Like,
31:46 Speaker 05 That person is worth a lot of money. Take 30 minutes and get ready to send her an email. Right. And this is another thing that I think is also really important about signals that, like, how do I then instantly turn this into a scale operation? The answer is you don't. Ideally, there's a lot of like by hand stuff. And when you're in the by hand motion, you'll realize it's like, oh, oh, I wouldn't. I'm glad I didn't create a prompt like I thought I was going to because I missed all this. Right. And it's like, now that I'm looking back over it, I realized that I didn't have it right. And I think that's another part of the reason why I think stuff like AASDRs are a nightmare is because there's no opportunity to really get that right.
32:28 Speaker 05 They don't train on your voice and your language, the way that you write and talk. They don't know any of that stuff. Right. They in fact, know very little. Right. So when you do this stuff by hand, then you can commit it to an orchestration tool and to prompts and things like that, and you can scale it up. But, but I think it's an excellent question. The best way to answer it is actually do it by hand. Right. But start with what's all the information that I could scalably gather about my ICP that would make me better informed in how it is that I would reach out and then put it together from there.
33:01 Speaker 04 I think that's my favorite learning from our conversation, whereas I'm thinking through segmentation and then signal and then which channel, there's a missing piece there, which is analyzing, I think you called it psychographic profiles, but analyzing the person and their writing style. And based on their writing style, you can infer how you should write to them. Then send the message is an interesting middle step to understand how to make sure that you're getting not only deliverability, but resonance with your message.
33:33 Speaker 05 Yeah.
33:34 Speaker 04 The last part of this is that the sort of, you know, you mentioned, all right, it's not automation and more is more. This tends to be more focused. The strategy is less is more, more enrichment of the right people, delivering the right message, understanding their behaviors, their profile, and then being laser targeted. Talk to me about the system here that you're using. I know that you're a HubSpot firm. Why are you using HubSpot as the central architecture for building all of this as opposed to other systems or Martech stacks where you're weaving it all together?
34:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
34:13 Speaker 05 So on the complex can do anything side, Marketo is entirely too complex.
34:21 Speaker 05 Market share is waning. It's not a great place to, you know, build an agency in my perspective. The Salesforce ecosystem, Pardot is objectively a pile of hot steaming garbage. It's a terrible marketing automation platform. Now it's what
34:35 Speaker 04 Give them, give them some credit. It's survived a really long time.
34:39 Speaker 05 Dude, it really has. And it's incredible to understand their story. I mean, their founder basically bootstrapped that thing to a really nice exit to Salesforce and did really well. And now, I mean, there aren't many major, like, complex B2B software packages that didn't actually get an early check from that guy. So, so I have, I mean, he was early and killed it and was like, well, there's got to be an alternative to Marketo and he built it, right? And I have John Miller and the guys from the Marketo team too. They're awesome. Like, they're all, they're all awesome and they will all tell you that those systems aren't built to support modern marketing.
35:17 Speaker 04 They're 20 year old systems.
35:18 Speaker 05 A hundred percent, a hundred percent. HubSpot to their credit, while they're coming up on about 20 years now, they, they do keep building. They commit new stuff really quickly, right? It's an elegant kind of integrated platform, whereas like Salesforce Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce CRM, they're all built on different database structures. So moving information back and forth is really a pain in the ass. If you think that marketing's job is to enable sales, you should have a marketing system that has the, that speaks the exact same language as the CRM. The only full featured solution
36:01 Speaker 05 that does that is HubSpot. Like, period. That's not an opinion, it's a fact, right? There's just no other way to have that kind of fluency across the entirety of GTM. Now, can you make it work? Across other systems for sure. But HubSpot is just so elegant and in singularity to me, right? And their ecosystem is robust. If there's anything that you need that's missing, it's probably in there somewhere. Building custom apps is an afternoon type thing, right? I mean, it is a fast development platform, right? So there's a lot of benefits there. But it's, I just trust them to keep getting it right, right?
36:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think that, as I think through this entire conversation of segmented segmentation to signal, understanding who you're talking to, let's call that profile enrichment, and then messaging, it all has to live somewhere. And there is this constant challenge for me and I think other marketers of do I want this unified system that's built all together? Or am I martech-ing it together? Am I, you know, using duct tape and glue to pass data from place to place to place? And I think that, you know, it might be, to use your email open line, potato, potato. You know, it might be one or the other. Maybe it can be done both ways.
37:25 Speaker 04 I understand the value for a unique system and, you know, you're building something that is sophisticated and can scale for larger organizations. Makes sense that you want something that's unified, that not only can be built and easily scaled, but also that people feel comfortable operating in.
37:44 Speaker 05 I think that's right. I think that's right. And, and we don't really want to go into an environment where we have to make a core systems argument, right? That's, you know, we don't sell HubSpot, right? We don't go into accounts and convince them to leave ToolX for, for HubSpot, right? It's, that's, that's not our game. There's a quarter of a million HubSpot customers, 25,000 of whom are very large and fit our, our primary ICP, right? So that's a really good place for us to go. It's a massive market. If we are currently serving 25 customers at one time, we're doing great, right? So our degree of penetration on that market does not need to be huge for us to be very, very happy.
38:25 Speaker 04 All right. I want to go on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple of quick hitting questions around signal-based marketing and a little bit about your career. Are you ready?
38:33 Speaker 05 Sure, let's hit it.
38:34 Speaker 04 Here we go. What's the biggest learning that's still apples to apples today from your two martech exits?
38:43 Speaker 05 Ooh, God, uh, never raise outside capital.
38:47 Speaker 04 Oh, you're a bootstrapper?
38:48 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
38:49 Speaker 04 Okay, why? Why wouldn't you raise outside capital today?
38:52 Speaker 05 Uh, because I don't think that you need to. One, the second that you raise any, it changes your brain chemistry as to what it is that you are doing, why you're doing it and how you are doing it. Um, it takes you away from the customer. If you are customer obsessed, you are going to get to cash faster and customer cash is better. Um, the other thing is, what if you get to a million bucks? Someone wants to give you to ten, get, give you $10 million to, to take your business? That is an incredible result and the vast majority of quote unquote, successful exit founders don't get a check for 10 million.
39:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, but you don't get on chat, TechCrunch for getting 10 million bucks.
39:32 Speaker 05 Uh, look, if you're going for vanity, good for you, but I could give a shit. I could absolutely care less. I care about my family. I care about my health. I care about my sanity and not having an external cap table means that I am in charge of those things. I don't have external forces dictating whether or not I get to stay sane and where I'm going to spend my time.
39:54 Speaker 04 You're preaching to the choir. I have this argument with two of my neighborhood friends all of the time. Both of them has, have taken outside capital and the argument is, why wouldn't I take somebody else's money to figure out if this business is going to work? As opposed to investing my own, which I understand in the early phases, you still get a paycheck and you're figuring out if it works and you're, you know, sharing what could be a large pie with other people. That's their argument. Mine is if I'm going to build something that's successful, why shouldn't I own and control it? I'm in your camp. I understand the other one as well. Moving on.
40:31 Speaker 04 Nick, I'm going to give you a magic lamp and when you rub it, the blue genie comes out and he's going to say, I'm going to get, grant your wish for three signals that you can track for the rest of your career. Which signals do you choose?
40:43 Speaker 05 Public filings, so SEC filings.
40:48 Speaker 05 Incredibly robust conversations about the business.
40:50 Speaker 04 So you're getting, you're getting funding data. Tell me what you mean by public philex.
40:55 Speaker 05 Yep. So 10 Ks and 10 Qs. They go on and have a full discussion about everything that matters in the business. Risks, concerns, upsides, projections, performance reviews. I mean, it is the executive team taking an hour to talk about how the quarter has gone and why, and what they think is coming next.
41:17 Speaker 04 All your public company information.
41:18 Speaker 05 Amazing, amazing information. Line by line, items of budgets and where they're projecting them to go. I mean, really unbelievable data and wholly underutilized, oftentimes underutilized in the HubSpot customer ecosystem because very few of them have quote unquote grown up to sell to the enterprise. But as they do, I think that data is going to become ever more important. That's one. Two.
41:42 Speaker 05 I would definitely go with executive hires. So VP and up, certainly C level and up. I would take those, those signals all day.
41:57 Speaker 05 The indicator changing, changing guard, fresh budget eyes. You know, an indication of potentially changing strategy, right? You can kind of look at their backgrounds and understand where they came from, the types of things they've done and built before to get an idea about where the company is going to go next. You know, the potential change what an entire department looks like, right? They might hire or fire based upon kind of where their brain is on various functions. So, I mean, the implications of a senior executive hire are significant. It takes a little bit more digging to understand the relevancy. I wouldn't say it's a discreet quote unquote alpha signal, but it's a big one, right? Everybody should be aware of senior leadership changes in the organizations that they're selling to.
42:40 Speaker 05 I don't care what you sell and who you sell to, that's going to matter.
42:43 Speaker 04 Okay.
42:45 Speaker 05 Let me see, a third one that I would durably want to know.
42:53 Speaker 05 I would say M and A activity, right? So acquisitions substantially change how an organization is going to behave and the types of problems that they're going to be facing for at least the next 18, if not 36 months. So again, larger organizations doesn't help you sell to small guys, right? But, but I live in those large, complex sale environments. That's, that's home for me and that's where I like to spend my time.
43:22 Speaker 04 How's the company doing? Who's driving the car? And what groceries did they put in the back?
43:31 Speaker 05 That's really good. Yeah. That's pretty much it.
43:35 Speaker 04 All right. What's the one AI tool or capability that everyone's hyping right now that you think is going to be completely irrelevant in 12 months?
43:44 Speaker 05 Holy smokes, completely irrelevant AI tool.
43:50 Speaker 05 Geez.
43:54 Speaker 05 I think, I mean, I think we're living in a time where the, the answer is the tools are evolving so quickly that irrelevancy seems almost impossible to me. I think rappers, I think all the rappers are dead. Right?
44:10 Speaker 04 Are we talking like Tupac and Biggie here?
44:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, a hundred percent. They're already gone and it's really sad and I shut up here. You can see the tattoo that's here on the side.
44:18 Speaker 04 I saw the P Diddy documentary too.
44:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's a wow, was that something else? The, so, so the A I S D Rs and the 11 Xs and all of those qualifies, et cetera. I, I don't see a future for them because as soon as organizations start to get comfortable with Claude code, either by hiring people who know how to do it, by reimagining how you staff a go to market organization, by having at least somebody who's a developer light onboard, but you really don't need one. Claude code does all that, right? Way better with way better resolution. And at some point, OpenAI is going to come up with theirs and Gemini is going to come up with theirs. Right. And I think the competition on that front is going to get really severe over the course of the next 12 months.
45:03 Speaker 05 But I think that if you're exporting your go to market process in full to the cold part of your market. One, I think you should stop immediately. I think it's a waste of your time today, but I think functionally, every organization is going to get to a place where they understand how to take Claude code and make it do what they thought those A I S D Rs were going to do for them, but actually deliver. Right. And if you put that stuff on top of a major system of record like a HubSpot or Salesforce or what? I mean, Salesforce can't do any of this stuff. At least HubSpot lets you invoke Claude and OpenAI and all different L L Ms in workflows. Right. That is an incredible unlock.
45:48 Speaker 05 And if people aren't playing with that, it's huge. But I think that if you're exporting that stuff to kind of like a boxed up tool, I think you're nuts. And I think they'll all be dead and all the V C's that put in insane amounts of money into those tools are going to be scratching their heads in 12 to 18 months.
46:04 Speaker 04 Hey, look, Qualified already took the cash. They already took the exit from, from Salesforce and you know, there's a, a large group of businesses that I think that are laggards that want to adopt A I that are not ready to actually build with A I. And I think that's what that universe of tools is for. For, for me, I, I appreciate the wrappers. I, I think that it is, uh, the hype cycle around things like Claude Bot, or I think it's Molt Bot is what they renamed it to. Where there's an agent that's going to come in and can sophisticatedly run your entire computer and do everything for you.
46:45 Speaker 04 Like, that's a proof of concept that will, I'm already seeing the messages now. It's like, look, I created this thing and it can run my entire. Their computer and oops, it bought a Porsche for me and booked a vacation to, you know, and it's like, hey, you might not want to give it the keys to the car and your credit card right away. But I think that that goes away because more sophisticated developers and companies will build that technology. So it is protected for people that are using it. Like the full agentic stack where you can just talk to your agent and it will go do things will be built out by sophisticated companies, not bootstrapped. So that's my answer.
47:26 Speaker 05 I think that's right. Yeah, I think that sounds right.
47:28 Speaker 04 Okay, last question. Selfish question alert. If you were targeting B2B podcasters, what signals would you use to find them?
47:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, I so the one that I mentioned before, I actually think is great. I think finding, I think finding the white space for organizations that are otherwise investing in field, which means they care about brand, their CEO and C suite are active on LinkedIn, large followings, actively posting, good engagement with their posts. Those things would tell me that they're in the right spot. And obviously, if they fit the revenue profile that they could actually afford to invest in a good podcast like the ones that you guys make possible. I mean, those things I would, I would go after that all day long. Like I, I know that Chili Piper fits into that. And I can't believe they haven't thought about a podcast yet. And if they haven't, oh, my God, what an awesome opportunity, you know, to go and, and broker
48:22 Speaker 05 that conversation for them. And to give them a roadmap for the first, you know, 10 episodes or whatever it is. I just think that I would chase after that. If I were your CRO, that's, that's what I would build tomorrow and, and run after that really hard.
48:36 Speaker 04 All right. For any other podcast producers that are looking for B2B podcasters in the marketing and technology space, that question was for you.
48:51 Speaker 04 Nick, like I said in the intro, sometimes you meet someone, you see him across the room and you're like, that's my person. I cannot tell you how much I agree with your philosophy, appreciate your approach, and just think that you're a sage, smart marketer that understands how these systems are built for the modern time right now. It's a problem we're trying to solve. I hope everybody that was listening enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Thanks for coming on and being my guest.
49:20 Speaker 05 Thanks a ton, man. This was a lot of fun. Thank you.
49:23 Speaker 04 All right, that wraps up this episode of the MarTech Podcast. Thanks to Nick Zeckets, the Chief Firestarter at Smoke Signals for joining us. If you'd like to contact Nick, 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. It's smokesignals.ai. 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 or subscribe on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed every week. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
50:21 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 iheareverything.com.
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