Michael Cole | Everflow
All marketers have experienced it. You launch your Google Ads campaigns and get a lot of leads, but so many of the leads that come through are low intent, poor fit contacts.
When Everflow VP of Marketing Michael Cole wanted to solve for this challenge, he turned to Everflow’s own platform.
In this episode, Michael explains how he imports Google Ads data into Everflow, marries it with company emails from his database, and uses that information plus the click ID to identify the best performing creatives and the highest intent leads. And then he optimizes his campaign spend around the creatives and audiences most likely to translate into revenue for the business.
Michael shares details on the process he’s used to nail his Google ads funnel, and how he’s taking the lessons learned and applying them to his Facebook and Instagram ads.
Check out the full episode to get the details.
Resources from this episode:
Connect with Michael on LinkedIn
Email Michael at michael@everflow.io
Visit the Everflow.io website
Check out Everflow’s case study on how it manages it’s Google Ads
Kathleen (00:00):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Michael Cole, who is the VP of Marketing at Everflow. Welcome to the show, Michael.
Michael (00:25):
It's great to be here.
Kathleen (00:27):
I'm excited to talk to you because this is sort of funny, you and I have known each other for a while and we've talked all kinds of business, but I've never really had the chance to like dig into like how you're running your own ads. You guys have a platform that the, that helps other companies do this kind of thing, but you're using it for yourself. And I always love these interviews when it's around like drinking your own champagne, cuz I hate saying eat your own dog food. So we're gonna jump into that, but I wanna start with you explaining a little bit about yourself and your background, but also really what Everflow is because I think a lot of the people who listen to the podcast are not, not gonna be familiar with the type of solution you have. And it's so cool. So I wanna make sure we explain it to start.
Michael (01:11):
Yeah. So Everflow is it starts as a partner marketing platform. So the core thing that we solve is that you to manage partners, you need to have a platform where you can track performance from each of those, manage them, optimize them, make sure that there's no fraud happening and then ultimately pay those partners. And the big piece of that too, is that they need a place where they can log in, see how much, how their performance is shaping up and how much like sales they've driven, how much revenue they generate without that loop. You really can't build a, a successful partner program because people will send traffic to you. They'll do all these initiatives, but if they're not getting that initial, that, that immediate feedback that look here is how much revenue I've generated. They're not gonna keep promoting your program. So that's like the, the core problem we solve.
Michael (02:07):
But what the cool thing about being a more modern platform and having a very flexible solution is that we realize that we could actually track every single type of performance channel. So that goes from your affiliates influencers, which are your traditional performance partners to strategic partners, referral partners, but even having your media buying there as well, the media buying in the same place as your affiliates is actually a very significant thing. So just to go back to my own personal experience my first start in this industry was working for a boutique affiliate management agency where we would manage the, a program for brands. It was a great time to be doing that the early days of the internet, where everything was much easier to drive traffic. And so affiliate was like a super booming space. And one of the things that I noticed there is that the problem with being an affiliate manager is it's a very siloed market.
Michael (03:06):
You basically have affiliate managers off on one side of a business, not talking to anyone else, regardless of whether it's an agency or someone internally, like they tend to sort, always be fighting for who deserves credit because you have all of these different channels that are driving performance for a brand affiliate marketing is a cheap, like one of the most cost effective channels. Like you are typically working with affiliate partner where you're paying them, say like 10, 15% of the revenue you're making. It's very easy and predictable in terms of how much you're gonna be spending. So if you have someone managing the affiliates and you have someone managing your Google ads and Facebook channels, and they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on paid media with very variable costs, like the revenue is very inconsistent in terms of how it goes. They want credit for every single sale that comes through, regardless of any other places it touch because they need to justify why they're spending that money.
Michael (04:07):
So affiliate marketing is sort of like the sort of like always in battle of like, no, no, no. Like you can see affiliates drove it here, whereas a paid needed. Person's like, no, no, we need it to be attributed here. Yeah. So that's a long towards this sort of like challenge of the different silos of performance marketing. And one of the cool things with Everflow is that you can have everything in the same place where you can do an apples, apples comparison of, okay, my affiliate touched this click here. Maybe the initial traffic came from a like influencer here and then ultimately like my paid channels deserve this much credit in terms of sales. And then the other thing that we do on top of that is that you can look at your sales, but you can also look at every single engagement event.
Michael (04:55):
The engagement events is super important for things that are top of funnel. So influencers many people will try to recruit influencers in their affiliate program. And then they'll just be disappointed when they're not driving a lot of sales because they're top of funnel. A lot of times people aren't there to buy at that moment. Whereas someone like a coupon website, like you were there to purchase from that brand coupons are at the bottom of the funnel. Influencers tend to be at the top of the, if you're just looking at sales, you're gonna think that these coupon websites are the greatest thing ever. And the influencers do nothing. If you start tracking engagement events like newsletter signups, do they join your membership program? Do they visit certain parts of your website? You get a much better picture of like, what is the actual, like engagement driven by the users of each different channels. And then you can start evaluating, maybe rewarding some partners differently, but more importantly, just understanding where they drive value and how to ramp them up.
Kathleen (05:55):
So there's a couple things I wanna unpack here cuz this, I, I find this so interesting. Like I come from more of a B2B marketing background and, and now I'm working in eCommerce and it's like these two industries have been separately tackling a similar problem, but in a very siloed way. So like in B2B there's all these partner marketing platforms are very focused on like, oh, you're working with like an agency channel or a, or a value added reseller. Right? And so they've built their platform around that very particular use case. And then on the e-commerce side, there's all these platforms that are built around affiliates and influencers and your platform is the only one that I actually am, are with that's really like purpose built to marry these two and also do more, which I think is, is really cool for a couple reasons.
Kathleen (06:45):
One being selfishly like that's something that I'm working on is doing both of those strategies. But also I just, I hear a lot of talk now in the B2B world of like, we have so much to learn from B2C. And I do think that, or DTC in this case, I do think that more B2B marketers are gonna start to do more with affiliate and influencer because it's working so well. And because they're really challenged by all the issues around retargeting and you know, the cookie list kind of direction that the world is going in. So I think, I think a solution like this is very needed. All of that is a very long way of kind of getting to some of the, you know, some of the more detailed discussions around when you have this all in one place, what are some of the possibilities?
Kathleen (07:31):
You guys are using it for yourselves, but you have a lot of brands using it before we get into your use. The one thing I wanna just one thread I wanna pull on here is you talked about something that I'm, I have opinions on, which is alignment. And we talk about this too for trades. Well, and you mentioned how like performance marketers don't necessarily wanna give credit for things to other people because they have to like prove the ROI of what they're doing. And I've, I've talked a lot about this too, when it comes to like ROAS can be a terrible metric, cuz it's very top line oriented and we're, we're all about trying to get people to focus on net margin contribution, but there's like structural disincentives for marketers to do that because they're measured, you know, right now performance is measured around ROAS right now agencies are comped on ad spend. And so maybe it doesn't make sense to change it to net margin contribution. Right now, marketers aren't often talking to the finance team. They don't always have visibility into profit margins and landed costs. And so the, I want, I want, I would love to get your take on this issue of the silos because I, I think there's a, is a much harder challenge to overcome than most people will acknowledge.
Michael (08:46):
Yeah. The silo
Kathleen (08:47):
There's a lot there.
Michael (08:49):
The silos are they're extremely challenging. And I think the way that we at least think about this internally is that the best way for us to sort of help in that situation is by having multiple stakeholders sort of getting information from the same place and benefiting from it because this is sort of like a, a challenge that we've base internally because the other thing that's weird about specifically when we're going after the affiliated marketing world is that they're typically at these companies and these will be gigantic brands. They'll be maybe like two people on the affiliate marketing team. And that's like a very specific silo. And as a SaaS product, that can be really dangerous because they can be doing amazing on your platform. And then both of them leave the company and suddenly like the platform is just not being used at all.
Michael (09:42):
They're trying to hire someone. There's no like the entire knowledge has been lost because when you have that few people, it can just end. So we've been thinking a lot about this sort of like silo issue into us. Like we need to better job. And we have been working on processes internally to bring in more stakeholders of the company. And we'll talk about this later about like there's so much actually I think just to go back, like you had a really great past guest talking about TikTok and Facebook media buying. And I thought that was really interesting too. Basically the need for having attribution outside of Facebook is so important to optimizing Facebook. We serve a, a similar place there. And the reason I mention that is that if you have someone who is logging into Everflow to check their attribution for Facebook and Google and then someone else who's logging in to manage their affiliates and partners, suddenly they're all looking at the same data.
Michael (10:43):
They're having conversations together. They're being like, oh, like what's happening here? Like why is there suddenly so much engagement events coming from this partner? Like by having everything go from these different silos into a single place, like get the conversation started, has like those water cooler conversations that sort of start making breakthroughs and keeps them from being so isolated from each other. So I really think that that is going to be a lot, like, it, it, that is to me like the simplest way to solve it is just having multiple people invested where rather than competing, like trying to figure out how to solve things together. And like, you're always gonna have struggles with like who deserves credit, but at least if they're having conversations where they're benefiting in other ways, like you're going to start having movement towards like consolidating internally the marketing division of like all performance marketing versus having silos of like marketing versus Facebook marketing, influencer marketing, et cetera.
Kathleen (11:40):
So I have a question for you on that, and this is not what we were gonna talk about, but it's, I I'm fascinated by this cuz we grapple with the same thing. Right. I agree completely. In fact, we talk about these themes of like data unification, alignment and speed being the three things that are key to success and certainly in eCommerce, but I think in most businesses. Right. but, but when it comes to alignment, you know, and I'll speak as a marketer, like I know there are marketers out there who are like, I don't want my finance, my head of finance, looking at all the details of marketing. Like they're just gonna be up in my business all the time, asking me about these like really detailed things when I just want them focused on the outcome. Right. And like, I think there's that feeling of like, yeah, in theory, we all think that that alignment and, and visibility is good, but in practice we're like that's gonna be a pain in my right. So do you ever run into that with these conversations you have with your users and your customers?
Michael (12:40):
We havent run into that, but I also think that there there's two parts to that one. If you're that worried about it that might be a sign of a toxic culture in your company, more than any other issue. And also I tend to find that transparency is the best way to handle these types of things because if finance logs in, they're like, oh, that's how much we spent. Cool. I'm just gonna get my report of spend every day. And like, I know I could log in and they'll never log in again anyway. Right. Like you actually diffuse it. Whereas if you have to keep arguing for budget and be like, here's how much revenue we're making, here's much spend, we just need slightly more budget. Like it's much more challenging in that situation because then you're having this sort of constant battle for budget versus just giving it to them and them deciding like, oh, we didn't actually need to check this at all. Go ahead and keep spending.
Kathleen (13:31):
Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. But I just think this is fascinating. Cause I do think they're, there's a lot of people who are still, who still have a very legacy mindset about this, who are, who wanna build these like walls around what they're working on so that nobody else can see into it. And that doesn't, it's not, it's not healthy. I agree with you. All right. Shifting gears. So you guys are using this for yourselves. So tell me a little bit about that.
Michael (13:55):
Yeah. So I mean, first off, if you're a B2B company, no matter what you need, like referral partnerships are gonna be your best channel. So you need some way to manage those referral partners. And, and realistically, like on that side, like our strongest channel is gonna be referrals. Like we get a, a ton of them are so some just sort of like background on Everflow. We're about a 80 person company. We started back in 2016. We're completely bootstrapped. We've never taken any money. The founders threw some money at the beginning after they had sold the last company to start Everflow and it's grown purely on pro outfit in cash. So we have to really eat our own dog food in terms of everything that we're doing on the marketing side has our
Kathleen (14:43):
Own champagne. Michael, not the dog food, sorry they don't eat the dog food.
Michael (14:47):
We have to drink our own champagne with actually being very like revenue and profit focused in terms of everything we're doing. And as the marketing leader for our company the, the sort of dirty secret is that so much of our success has nothing to do with me. The reason Everflow has got into this point is basically two things. One, we have a really good platform and tech team but two way more important that is we have an incredibly good customer success, culture of training, onboarding, et cetera. And that dedication towards customer success means that one customer sign up with us and they start seeing traction. They love the experience. They get genuinely passionate about being treated like humans and being treated with respect. So that has led to a ton of referrals on a constant basis. So partners getting our partners to become referral partners, getting our customers to become referral partners.
Michael (15:50):
That's like our number one growth energy in, and a piece of that is managed through Everflow, which is basically tracking any type of those partners that more, that requires revenue and payments to be involved. So you're always gonna have two types of referral partnerships. One is people that do it out of love. They're just passionate. They want to share the word about how much they loved your platform. And in that situation, you really don't wanna bring up money at all. Sometimes you still wanna set them up with tracking so that they can see how much customers are referred, because that feels good, that they know that they've made a significant difference by making these referrals. But the other part of that is if you don't wanna bring in money when they don't wanna have money involved, because then it changes the relationship. There's sort of like intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards.
Michael (16:44):
And there's a lot of psychological research on this. So basically once you start bringing in money, it stops being loving relationship of them referring versus them being sort of mercenaries or a job. And a lot of times that's actually demotivating. So you have that first set that really shouldn't be managed through a partner program, except if you're gonna just give them some transparency into referrals, you have the second set where either as an individual or as a company, the, the money either matters or they just want it to justify on their side. In which case, the ability to track the, all of the referral relationships, how much revenue each of the customers that they've sent has earned, and then paying them a percentage of that. Then you need a platform for managing that. So that's sort of the referral side of how we've grown our business.
Michael (17:37):
The second one is we do a lot of Google ads, media buying, and about maybe two years ago we had a demand gen person and when they ended up deciding to leave the company I was stuck managing the program again. And turns out when you do many, many different you wear many hats and do many roles. That's a time consuming thing. So I looked at all the stuff he had done and I was like, how do I do less busy work on my side? Because I don't wanna be logging these platforms and collecting the data. And so at that point we started piping our Google ads data through our own platform for tracking not only the, the attribution, but also just making sure that we had everything flowing through us and was flowing into our CRM and everything else like that.
Michael (18:34):
So that was the first stage. And then after doing that, we, we sort of came to a, a pretty big realization which is just basically like frankly, Google ads re their attribution is not really home for doing optimization for any type of business that is B2B or lead focused. There's two reasons for that one. Google ads. Attribution is very I like to call it squirrly. They will tell you that these five ads have all touched the user before they sign up for a demo on our website. And I really don't care about that. I don't care that they saw five ads. I only care that they saw this one keyword, and that is what motivated them enough to actually go to my website, sign up for that demo request. So that base attribution and the ability to track that is super viable.
Michael (19:31):
The other thing that we realized is just there's no way to have personal data inside of Google and they, they don't wanna touch that for the like for many like GDPR reasons. But without that information, they're missing something very, very critical, which is especially as a SaaS company, there's, there are basically two types of leads and they are not equal. You have junk leads with some like Gmail address, a Yahoo that where some random person went there. And especially in our field where affiliate marketing, there's a whole suite of people that think they're gonna get rich quick at home, and they are gonna sign up for your platform and they are not the right prospect in any way. You need some way to filter out all of those generic emails. And then on the other side, you have company emails and those ones are hot leads.
Michael (20:25):
And just knowing that single detail of company email versus generic email, the difference to those qualities massive in our case had we not had any attribution data? We would think that our best keyword is affiliate marketing because there's a ton of traffic there. It drives a ton of conversions and every single one of those conversions is complete chunk. Just generic emails will never go anywhere. It's it's affiliates that are wanting to promote you, or, I mean, I'm, that's, that's too generous that they're just none. They will not respond to anything and nothing will ever come of it. But Google would be like, look at how amazing this key. It is. Spend more money here. You're getting so much leads on this. This is the greatest keyword ever, but even the most basic attribution data tied on top of that tells you actually when you look at the difference in lead quality, these are very different.
Michael (21:22):
So what we do is basically all attribution is handled in Everflow. So every single click comes from Google. Google can pass a Google click ID on each of those clicks. And then we actually pass that data back into Google ads with different values. So we say like, if it's a generic email that's worth like $5. If it's a company email, maybe that's worth like, ah, that thousand dollars, we, we just have a general thing. Cause we just want, we want as much traffic coming from generating company emails as possible. And so we pass that back into Google ads. And then because we have the Google click ID, it's actually gonna be associated with the actual ad that drove it and then I can log to Google and see, okay, for this search term this is a, so the other thing with Google ads is that they can pass you keyword data on every click, but keywords are, they don't mean that much in Google anymore because it's all about intent.
Michael (22:21):
So the, the keyword might be affiliate marketing, but it could also be like Nike affiliate marketing. Yeah. And affiliate marketing, like the actual search term is so different from the keyword. You really need to be able to pass that data back into Google ads and then have a report there where you're seeing, okay, for each conversion here is the, the actual search string used. And then you can be like, I wanna optimize this one, this other one look good, but it's really low quality converse. I'm gonna just deactivate that keyword entirely or specific like, like narrow mats, that one to block that one because even though it looks good on paper, it's actually terrible. So even that basic attribution ended up being massive for our ability to, to scale up our, our program. And now we upgrade it to next stage, which is just having the HubSpot data feed into our system. And now rather than doing it on the email level, we're doing it based on our HubSpot customer stages. So prospects have a different value than MQL and a customer obviously is where the highest value is. So we wanna do as much as spend towards the, as keywords.
Kathleen (23:31):
Oh, that's cool. So, so when you started doing that, you started doing that with your platform. Yeah. Talk to me about like how, the, what, how that's impacted your results.
Michael (23:45):
Yeah, so it, I mean the, the tricky thing is like it on paper. It's not that impressive because no matter what Google finds a way to spend all of the budget, you give it,
Kathleen (23:56):
But is it like a time savings? Is it a speed to kind of iteration? Like I, cuz I feel like there's value that comes in three different ways. There's like, Hey, there's this dollar value that our sales increased by or there's this percentage that our conversions increased by. And then there's like, man, I'm spending one day less a week doing all this. Or there's, I'm able to run 10 ad experiments a week as opposed to five, you know? So like how does that manifest?
Michael (24:22):
Yeah. So one thing, it, it, so Google will auto optimize based on value. So you're giving Google all the information to actually send more, like spend more on the actual search terms and keywords that are actually driving high quality leads. So that means that the overall quality is massively gone up by doing this. So I think that's the biggest one is that rather than spending a bunch of money on keywords that will never drive you any high quality leads, you're spending all of your budget on the high quality lead sources. So we still spend the same. Yeah. But the quality goes up massively in that situation and the amount of traffic you're receiving from your highest quality keywords goes up significantly. So that's the biggest one. The second one is that it automates the whole process. Like you have to do a lot less optimization because Google is automatically incentivized to send more traffic from the things with the highest value.
Michael (25:20):
You can do a return on ad spend to basically have it optimized that way. We're still playing around with that because they have multiple different attribution method methods that they use for optimization. And we're still not sure if we should just continue to do maximizing conversions. Despite the fact we have so much more data in their system, this is where it's a little bit frustrating with Google. Like our demand gen person is doing like a call every week, two weeks with our am. There, we've tested everything under the sun. And a lot of times like even their algorithm doesn't seem that helpful a lot of the times, which is very frustrating. You're like, we're giving you much better data, but you should be doing more. So it still might be better to do maximize conversions, but I'd say like the biggest thing is deactivating. The things that will never drive value has a huge return on your quality improvement. You're gonna get more leads. You're gonna get higher quality leads. That's where you really see the, the biggest gain. And you don't have to spend very much time on it. You can spend all your time on choosing new ads, testing out new keywords and stuff because you, that the attribution is solid and that you're actually spending your money on the things that is driving high quality leads that can actually become customers rather than just waste your sales team's time.
Kathleen (26:40):
Yeah. Interesting. Well I love that. I love that you guys are using it and that it, it sounds like it's all about winnowing, weeding out the, the underperforming ads. And I think everybody has this challenge with garbage leads, right? Like you get the tire kickers or the job seekers or the, you know, the competitors who are putting in abc@123.com as their email. And gosh, anybody who can completely solve for that problem is gonna make a million dollars easily. So that's really, that's really interesting. Now is it just Google ads that you're using it for or are you using it across any other channels?
Michael (27:22):
So we are just in the stage of test out Facebook and Instagram. It works the same for that. And then, so we have, I mean, we, for customers that use it for Facebook and TikTok for the most part, and then we specifically use it for Google ads because it really suits our business model. Right. but we're in the early stage, just testing it for Facebook right now with minimum ad spends and stuff like that. And then there's some other stuff we'll be testing out in the near future that I'm excited for, but it's always a challenge with marketing is that you're always, it's really about choosing your battles because you can do a thousand things. And the problem is the more things you do, the more you really can't make good decisions around it, because if you have 20 things running it once it's really hard to tell what's working.
Michael (28:18):
Yeah. so I also, I know that you did a really interesting episode about Substacks and stuff like that. And I, I respond to that one just cuz I thought it was so cool. The idea of newsletter placements and stuff, because there is a really interesting like upcoming world of sort of like the B2B partner program and affiliate marketing on that side because the world of B2B has changed a lot in terms of two major things, one the rise of B2B influencers. So there are so many ways to now promote your product across channels like LinkedIn and get a ton of reach. Yeah. And those all require the sort of same methods you would be using for traditional affiliate where you need some way to check it some way to do attribution on it in some way to pay those influencers, not just front, but also align most of the payments on them actually driving real customers because the better you align your payouts, the more they make, if they're really good. Yeah. Because traditional, so I mean there's always been B2B affiliate programs. Back in the day I used to manage eFax, which was like electronic facts in the early days.
Kathleen (29:32):
Oh boy, that's dating us.
Michael (29:36):
And one of the things with that is that the way you would structure the affiliate program because they had those affiliate networks tend to be very basic in what they can handle is you would just pay like $30 for a free trial and that's it. And then you'd have to spend a bunch of times making sure that you are removing any fraudsters that are really gaming the system with like stolen credit cards, et cetera. That was a lot of what affiliate management was. It works. Okay. But the problem with that is that you're a most of your time is spent on fraud prevention of people that are gaming that system. And two, your best partners. Aren't really making that much money. Whereas if you have a structure where say you pay them $5, the lead, then you can pay them $400 on a customer because you know, that, that backs out to a really high value situation partners that have really great traffic that are driving a lot of customers.
Michael (30:29):
Like they're making way, way more money. And with affiliates, the more money they make, the more they can promote you. So there's a lot of opportunities there with like more sophisticated attribution to really ramp up affiliate relationships into a much more healthy thing. So you have influencers and the other one is like Substacks and newsletters and stuff like that. There's so much of these. I mean it used to be blogs, but Substacks are, they tend to be a lot more professional. They have a lot of like journalists that are doing this as like side gigs. That's really great content. And the ability to track how much performance you're getting there. You may just be paying them up front in that situation. But if you're seeing how much, not only you're getting in terms of sales, but also engagement around membership, et cetera, like these all make a big difference too. And so I think that these are all new avenues for scaling up B2B that are really exciting.
Kathleen (31:27):
Yeah. I totally agree with you. And I, I did a post about this the other day on LinkedIn, about how, what I'm seeing is like I, and I sort of talked about it earlier. There's this convergence between how B2B and B2C have traditionally gone to market and I'm calling it like influence marketing, which is different than influencer marketing it's, but it's about like, it's not just influencers, it's creators and creators are those. They can be B2B influencers. They can, you can have creators within your own company, like your own subject matter experts. But it's about, it's about drafting off of the, of people, individual brands, as opposed to company brands. And it's not to say that company, you know, company brands and partnerships are gonna die, but, but there's really an interesting groundswell happening with individuals and so much opportunity that I don't think brands have yet taken advantage of. So it's kind of cool that you guys have a platform to enable that.
Michael (32:22):
Yeah, it's definitely an exciting place. And I, I think that the creator economy is definitely an interesting thing for both B2B and B2C. And it's just one of those things that if you wanna work with creators, you just, it goes back to that intrinsic first extrinsic. Yeah. It don't always bring in money because sometimes money helps moves things forward. And sometimes it doesn't, if someone's passionate about your brand, you want to just make it as easy as possible for them to promote you and have them feel good about promoting you money sometimes makes them feel good and sometimes makes them feel bad. Just be careful with that. And the ability you still wanna be able to track everything and get those partners onboarded and, and have some feedback loop into them. Because even if it's not money, you wanna invite them to say your own industry conferences and events and parties and stuff like that. If they're promoting your brand and sending a bunch of like interested users that are say signing up for your newsletter or spending a lot of time on your website, like these sort of data points are actually super helpful for understanding where to spend your time, regardless of who should be paid.
Kathleen (33:35):
Yeah. That's a really great point. Sort of that distinction between the brand evangelist versus the, you know, paid affiliate or influencer. It is an important distinction. All right, we're gonna shift gears cuz I have two questions. I always ask my guests and I wanna make sure we don't run out of time. So the first is a lot of the marketers. I talk to say one of their biggest pain points is just keeping up with all the changes in the world's digital marketing. It there's so much happening and evolving. How do you personally stay up to date?
Michael (34:04):
I think that all things are learned through necessity. So it's one of the great things about working for a startup is that you constantly have to overcome new challenges and you have new team members joining with new ideas. So I find that the best way to actually learn this stuff is just to be in a situation where you need to learn it. And I think that the other piece of that is one of the, the sort of, we all know that CMOs tend to have very short lifespans at these large companies. I think the average CMO is something like a year and two months that like these large companies.
Kathleen (34:43):
Yeah, that's crazy.
Michael (34:44):
I know. And I think that the problem with that is this traditional marketing perspective of like their job is just awareness and leads. And if they're doing that, then they've succeeded. And the problem is that, I mean, as we've been talking about the entire entire time, like most leads are garbage. Yeah. Like we, we tried the whole white paper route and one of the companies literally just they clearly just pulled this information from zoom info and then put our random competitors associated with each brand. And so we started asking them like, there's no way that this small competitor has like HP and like Lenovo and all these other major brands and they just refunded the money and stopped asking any questions. And it's like generating leads is super simple. As long as you're dealing with unethical people that are sending you just a list of information, but it's not useful.
Michael (35:39):
And as a marketing leader if you're just trying to hit a lead count, you're so misaligned with the company and growth. And I think as soon as you're trying to actually get leads that become prospects to become customers, then you have to keep learning really quickly because most channels are not gonna work for you. And the ones that do they require constant work and more team to be brought on, et cetera, to keep making them successful. So again, I think that necessity is what forces a lot of learning. And, and then on top of that there's a handful of really great podcasts out there. I've just recently started listening to yours and I think it's one of the rare ones that's really great. So obviously I'm a fan of that. And then the other one that I've been a huge fan of is now called the exit five podcast.
Michael (36:36):
So is David Gerhart's podcast. I see. Still think that that is one of the most actionable ones. And then the other classic one that I think any marketer should learn from is a SaaStr. Yeah. If you're going to rise up in the, the ranks that your company looking at SaaStr and sort of like the thought process towards like how you hire VPs is really helpful for you to develop up your own skills towards becoming that role. So I think that those are like the three most useful sources, because if you put yourself in a situation where you have to learn, like you will learn and a lot of companies don't give you that opportunity. So you have to sort of figure out how to strategically put yourself in a position where you get it, you can start developing that.
Kathleen (37:19):
Yeah. But you're right about being in a startup. I mean, that's been my experience since I'm a glutton for punishment who continues to goes to startups, but it's cuz I like to have my hands dirty. Like I don't ever wanna be that person. Who's just managing people. And they say like, some people say when you're a CMO, your job is really just to hire. And I'm like, okay, that does not sound like a job I would enjoy. I I'm good at hiring and I like doing it, but I also still wanna do marketing. Right. So that's just me. But second question is, and you named a few people, but I'm curious, like this podcast is all about inbound marketing and I, I define it differently than the traditional HubSpot definition. It's for me, it's like whatever naturally attracts the right buyer to you. And so I'm curious if there's either a person or a company out there today that you think is really setting the standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer.
Michael (38:10):
Yeah. The, the one that always comes to mind, this is like the classic example now is gong.io. They still have a few things that they do. That's just so amazing. Their marketing has always been incredible. I really love them for a long time because I thought their website looked pretty janky.
Kathleen (38:29):
Oh my God. It was like the craziest thing that they got as big as they did and had that website don't get me started.
Michael (38:35):
I know. But that's what I love about like it's the most pure marketing you can ever be like who cares about design? Like if it's fun and the copy's great. And it is actually speaking to needs, like it was always so educational because it was not that great. Yeah. That it was very inspirational because I could do that one.
Kathleen (38:53):
Yeah. Isn't that funny? I had the same reaction when I looked at their site, I was like, wait, what the, what? Like this big company that everyone's talking about, this is their site, but it is super fun. And it just goes to show you that, like that's not the thing that matters the most is the, the design of the site.
Michael (39:10):
For sure. And then the other things that they do really well is turning their cus their team to thought leaders. I think this is gonna be continuing to be like one of the best ways for companies to grow their brand is by getting anyone on their team. Who's passionate to be more active on social, providing them with not only the information for them to like data and stuff that they can share and be, and have a, a viewpoint on, but also amplifying them as the company amplifying the individual. Like that's a really big opportunity. And then their thing just to go back this in a specific company thing, but really if you wanna be successful in marketing, make sure that you join or help cultivate the customer success culture in your own company. Because if you are making your customers excited, then you're gonna have amazing referrals.
Michael (40:05):
Referrals are gonna always be your highest revenue type of customer because they're already locked in. They already want to be successful with you. They don't have any skepticism. So I would say that more than taking example of another company, just look at your customer success funnel and see how you can help them be successful first. Like if your help desk is amazing and your team is amazing on that side, you're gonna have a really good user experience. And then as a marketing leader, you're gonna look great because your, those customers are referring more customers. And, and then you're like, oh look, I'm a genius. All my marketing is amazing, regardless of anything, you've actually done past making sure customer success is awesome.
Kathleen (40:46):
That's a great tip. And that is the tip we're gonna end on. All right. Well, Michael, this has been so great. If somebody wants to reach out and connect with you or ask a question or learn more about Everflow, what's the best way for them to do that?
Michael (41:01):
Yeah. You can always connect with me on LinkedIn. Just look at Michael Cole plus Everflow because I have a very generic name. You can also email me at michael@everflow.io. I'm always happy to answer any questions and you can definitely check out our website stop by, see if it can help your brand. And like, we're always, I'm always happy to answer any questions. Anyway, like we have a case study on how we do Google ads internally that basically walks through every single step that we do internally because we have no reason to, to hide this stuff. We're not, we're not in a very competitive space. All our competitors are at least years older than us. And so we'd rather just be completely transparent about everything we're doing to grow our own brand. Because if you learn something from that, you're probably are gonna look at us favorably favorably. And if that's a situation you might sign up for us, it might refer more people and then I'll look good again.
Kathleen (42:01):
All right, you need to send me the link to that case study, cause I'm gonna share it with my head of growth. And I will put the links to that as well as your website and your LinkedIn and all the other things you mentioned in the show notes, which are available at kathleenbooth.com. And if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, head to apple podcast, please and consider leaving the podcast a review that helps us get found by other people. And if you know somebody else, who's doing amazing marketing work, I would love to interview them. So you can just tweet me at @Kathleenlbooth on Twitter and I'll make them my next guest. In the meantime, thank you so much, Michael, for joining me. This was a ton of fun.
Michael (42:39):
Thank you as well. Have a wonderful day.
