50 #!$* Episodes!? What Have We Learned?

It’s interesting because, like, we we didn’t know what this was gonna be. Right? To really grow an audience and the feedback we get. This is the thing that’s amazing to me too. Like, I get messages on LinkedIn. We now have PR firms reaching out to us, asking for people to be on, And that’s just everyone out there listening and sort of resharing in our little video clips and all that. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by six cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Adam. Yeah? It’s that time of year. The most wonderful time of the year? It is the most wonderful time of the year, except that sunlight is rare and, you know, sunset happens like four thirty where I am. But it’s also the time of year where my kids fight about the Spotify wrapped results because it it goes from one extreme of Taylor Swift all day every day to Kendrick Lamar on the other end. And because it’s so different, they can’t share the Spotify wrapped with their friends because they’re so embarrassed. So there’s like social pressure around Spotify. It’s a problem. Yeah. See, Mike is a little younger. My ten year old has been like, is Spotify better than Apple Music? Because I we’re an Apple Apple Music house. And I’m like, I don’t know. I just use it because Apple takes my money faster than Spotify, and it’s all like integrated. So And I think Apple ripped off Spotify Wraps and they call it like Apple year end review or something like that. But but we are beating around something very monumental monumental. In our minds. Let’s be honest. No. No. No. No. No. No. Everyone cares. Everybody cares. This is the fiftieth five zero episode of this podcast. Fifty. Doesn’t that blow your mind? Yes. Because it means I have fifty outfits. And it means I have five because if you go back, I’ve probably worn this at least ten times, and I tried. Okay. So I feel like, Adam, this warrants a Spotify rap of revenue makers. It absolutely does. I was told by many expert that a lot of most podcasts don’t make it past episode seven. Okay. So we beat that. We beat that. We beat Friends spin off Joey, which I think only did, like, twenty four episode, maybe even one season. Okay. That’s that’s a bigger accomplishment. I like that. What else? Actually, that was the only television example I had because I was gonna get really clever on that, but we’ve beaten a lot. I think we’ve done we’ve done quite a bit. So my plan, and I think I share this with you, was I was gonna take every transcript from every one of our episodes, and I was gonna pull the power of large language models and AI and throw them all and say, okay. Talk to me about these podcasts. What are the key themes? What should we really say that? What do we learn across fifty episode or forty nine? Because it’s actually the fiftieth episode. So forty nine episodes. It couldn’t do it. I tried ChatGPT. I tried Claude. I tried I some other products I won’t name. And just for one bit of context, I took every transcript, put it in one document. It is six hundred and ninety eight pages, two hundred and fifty thousand words. We talk way too much. It’s like that’s we need to shut up. I put it in. In one instance, it could only tell me about one episode. K. No matter what I asked. I was like, okay. In another instance, it was just like, I don’t know. Like, I don’t know if what the, like, the technical trade just was, like, cannot process. So I was very disappointed about this because it was gonna be like the the episode that AI built. So we would give us some conversation points. It didn’t work. But now I have a document of six hundred ninety eight pages and a quarter million words, which is all if anyone reads it, they’ll just be an expert in In everything. Yes. Because we’re what that tells me is we talk a lot, but I guess it’s very chaotic. And and the podcast analytics have been pretty great, so maybe people dig chaotic. And then to your point about podcast analytics, I basically have seven versions of the truth. But pulling it together from Apple, Spotify, YouTube, because we get we get people come and actually look at us on YouTube. Well, we do the outfits for a reason. And they’re they’re looking at your outfits, and they’re wondering, can he wear that again? But here’s what we’ve got. Five episodes Okay. Of of what I’ll say is our top five from a listener perspective. Let’s reveal the top five. And maybe we just talk through them and and hit on the high points. So what was number five? Actually, this is a very recent episode, and these numbers are very, very close in terms of numbers. So we had an episode about cold calling. Mhmm. Like, I don’t know. This was just a couple weeks ago with Nick from thirty minutes to president’s club. And that one, interestingly enough, had our biggest listener views, whatever you wanna call on YouTube, by, like, a factor of five. And it was a great episode, and it was we lost our minds in that episode as well because we were recording that from breakthrough, our customer conference, like, on the trade show floor. But really good. Really good. And I think it was interesting because, obviously, Sixth Sense wrote a book about no form, no spam, no cold calls. And so when we say cold calling sucks, you know, as Nick does and and in the book, the whole point of it is to not cold call, but to put some context into the why, to understand the signals as to why you should be reaching out to somebody and why you might have something of value to share with them. And so it was a nice sort of, coming together of of both books because we’re all trying to say the same things. Bring value to the prospect, share the value quickly in your opener of your cold call because people’s time is really valuable. Absolutely. And he I mean, we literally asked, how do you go about cold calling? Because, you know, again, he’s if you read the book, we talk about signals and all that. He literally goes into it, and it’s a really good way to, hey, this is a cold call, but it’s well researched, which was my favorite sort of line across all of their content. They use that a lot. I think that just works really well because it’s pretty straight up. So that one was really interesting, and I think that’s an audience of we’re trying to talk to salespeople. Right? And then we have some salespeople listen to the podcast, but marketers have to be in tune with how sales is going out and prospecting on the phone, and there was a lot in that one. It was literally three or four weeks ago, so it was worth checking out for sure. Alright. What else? Then so then here’s the other major reveal, I think, that we real actually, I know we realized throughout the last fifty episodes is that some of the most performing episodes, and this is wild to me, is just you and I throwing things against the wall. I can’t believe that. But, yes, the numbers don’t lie. The number four was our attribution episode, which I believe I said at the beginning, I thought it was gonna be you and I having a throwdown, which after forty nine episodes, we still haven’t had about any topic, which is time. Generally good, but also somewhat disappointing because at some point, we wanna argue about something. Mhmm. So I here’s why I think some of the Adam and Saima episodes work is because we’re practitioners. We are doing this every day and we’re talking about topics and problems that we face every day and attribution is a perfect example. Right? There is no perfect attribution out there. And so in the episode, we talk a lot about pick one version, measure it consistently so that you can compare over time how things are performing. Tools out there are helpful, but, again, there is no silver bullet. And so the recommendation beyond just picking one and sticking with it is doing a post analysis. Right? Every quarter, take your closed won deals and look at all the touch points along that journey. Not the last touch, not the first touch, not the touch that converted the form fill, but what happened along that journey. I mean, Carrie Cunningham research showed that the average b to b sales cycle is over eleven months right now. Right? And the average buying team size is eleven point something as well. And so you have to be looking at that full picture, whether it was engagement with display, whether it was clicking through a, nurture email by your champion, whether it was attending a webinar or attending a physical event, like, all of those touch points along the way that marketing is driving, also the sales touch points. Yeah. Absolutely. And and what was our one thing, which I think I repeated several times obnoxiously throughout that episode influence of marketing. And what do we say that was? Marketing influences one hundred percent Yep. Of your close one deals. Yeah. Well, if you if you’re doing it right. Right? And so which, you know, again, there’s so many things going on that the salesperson’s on the making a call, but, like, marketing, there’s a message out there. There’s content. I mean, again, it’s it’s to your point, there’s no perfect model. And, of course, there’s tools out there to let you track that journey. There’s also tools out there to do w shaped, x shaped, alpha, omega, shit, which I don’t understand or think make like, you wanna should need fourteen cents on the dollar to this particular like, that just gets a little bit out of control. But understanding the journey, like, tech can help you do that for sure. And just repeat those things and and continue to put budget there and maybe kill the things that aren’t helping move things along. It’s really basic, but you have to be looking at the data. Just understand that there is no single source of truth for the, again, the fourteen cents on the dollar that that webinar generated. Yes. And people can quote fourteen cents on the dollar. That’s gonna be my new thing now when I talk in any of our meetings. You’re gonna say like, well, this was thirteen cents up there. Anyway Alright. Attribution episodes a good one, and we’ll link all of these throughout Yes. In the show notes. Now the next one, I was surprised that it was in our top five, though, just because it was a little bit somewhat of a niche topic. And that episode was the revenue operations manual, which was actually an interview. It was our first time having two guests at the same time. It was very, like, was it gonna be, like, crossfire? I don’t know. But it was so Sean Lame and Laura Dent wrote this book called the revenue operations manual, and it’s a great sort of, like, deep dive into the profession and into the building the team and all that. And it’s one of our top rated episodes. And, again, it’s more recent too. It’s just a couple of maybe a month or two ago. So I’m not surprised. I’m not surprised. I know you said you’re surprised. I’m not surprised because marketing has become very technical and True. True. True. Rev ops function or even the marketing ops function. You need that to be super strong and super integrated with everything else that is running in the organization. And so to me, with a strong MOPS person is worth their weight in gold. And having the process, having the structure and consistency and naming conventions and, you know, just, again, having a single source of truth, that is critical to any marketer today needing to show the value or the impact of their efforts, but also just to make sure that the entire revenue org is marching to the same beat. So, again, I feel like it’s timely, it’s relevant, and it’s gonna be one of those things that every single go to market leader needs to make sure is done well. The The interesting thing is, like, marketing ops is a function is been around for a long time. Sales operations as a function has been around, but revenue operations in and of itself is pretty new of the three. And, like, depending upon where the company you’re you’re at, all three are in one. You know, it’s I found that pretty interesting as well. And, like, there’s so much and we talked about, like, there’s so much data. And we talked about marketing having so much data. Sales has so much data. There’s so much like, it’s overlooked. And right now, because here we are, so recording this episode in, near the end of the year, everyone’s in queue is in planning meet mode for next year. And so RevOps is in they’ve revving it into overdrive. Okay. That was Yeah. That was bad. Know the bad the dad jokes. That was actually one of I when you know when you stop yourself, you know it’s bad. It’s okay. Alright. So revenue operations. Yes. That was a good episode. Now the next episode, which I believe of all of the Simon and Adam episodes was probably the best Simon and Adam. And, actually, just as a little bit departure, we talk about people love the we did an episode on account based digital, which was really you asking me questions and me rambling for twenty five minutes. And the listing numbers are good, but we also for anyone out there in podcast who has a podcast, you know, you wanna know about consumption. You wanna know people who are listening whatever percentage through your episode. We have really good consumption. Right? People are listening to our shows, like, nearly all the way through. That episode went boom on consumption because people are like, what the hell is this guy talking about? It was literally, like, twenty or thirty percent less than I don’t believe that because it is number two on the list. But it was that’s just pure listening. You talk about consumption. No. It’s not on the list. The digital episode, this is the Oh, it’s not on the list. I was just pointing out that all Simon Adam episodes were not created equal, but that was really more, I take responsibility. You’re like, you well, you just jumped on that. So, but the the next episode is I thought it was great. I’m probably I’m obviously unbiased, but in my AI podcast project, I was expecting it to be like, oh, ICP isn’t every episode. It kind of is. So this episode was our definitive guide to ICP, at least in our opinion. Well, again, there’s a lot of hate on LinkedIn right now, by the way, for, like, everything is dead, whether it’s outbound, you know, MQLs, but also ABM is apparently dead. Right? And I don’t know. But regardless of what you are doing in your organization, you have got to understand who your target market is. Right? Yeah. What your ideal customer looks like. And so in that episode, and I think the reason it resonated is we do go pretty deep on specifically how we actually create our ICP, how we keep it fresh and relevant, and then how we use that ICP in every single campaign to ensure that we’re not wasting a single dollar on accounts that aren’t the right fit or on competitors or, you know, how we’re able to use it to parse out our enterprise ICP versus our commercial or strategic ICP. And so I think it’s just something that every marketer should be using. And and by the way, the reason we did that episode is because we found that it almost became like a game because Yeah. Yeah. Whichever guest we had on was talking about ICP. And so we we kind of knew we needed to go deep on that one. I agree. I think it’s a good episode, but I think it’s good because not just because we we’re good, but I think it’s a topic. No. It’s a topic that is just really top of mind for every marketer, and there are tools like Sixth Sense that can really help you develop a single source of truth for your ICP so that it’s not marketing’s list over here and sales list over here. So, yeah, that’s good. Yeah. And, again, like, talking about planning, going through a planning process, you’re thinking about potential growth. You’re thinking about next where am I gonna go? Like, an ICP exercise, a TAM exercise. All those things are incredibly relevant to figuring out what’s up for next year. You say, oh, we’re gonna quadruple next year. Well, are you? Is there actually accounts out there to do that? We talk about that a lot. And I think that, again, it’s really, really relevant for planning, like I said. So you should And I think the one point I would hit that maybe is worth repeating is the ICP really should take into consideration not just your land, but the retention on the flip side. And so a lot of the work that we do at six cents in our biweekly ICP meetings, which, again, I mentioned is a little crazy that we meet that often about it, but it is taking into consideration which accounts, not just are you winning, but are over year one, year two, year three actually being successful, expanding, you know, and are being retained. And so we really don’t wanna be selling churn, and so incorporating the post sale activity and retention numbers and expansion numbers is really crucial. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And again, like, again, I keep having a broken record, but all part of planning. You absolutely need to do understand because you might just decide this is not a segment for us. So we have to go and make up for it someplace else. Or if we’re gonna grow, we have to we literally need to go find, you know, new ICP someplace else. And it could also feed back to your product team and say, okay. Well, what do we need to actually break into this particular segment that we haven’t been able to do before? So it’s so fundamental, and it’s that was also a pretty good episode in terms of the number of acronyms, I think, that we had. And so ICT, TAM. Maybe that’s that’s only two, but anyway, it was it was really good. So number one, most listened to episode was about a transition to account based marketing. So Casey Carey at the time was CMO of Quanta. He’s actually moved on to a different role. But multi time CMO who’s gone through the the massive change management strategic shift of a company of moving from leads and MQLs to an account based model. This was, like, our second or third episode. I think we were still Early, early. Figuring out what we were doing. This was my my sick episode, but it really was so sort of, like, fundamentals of what we wanted to do with the podcast and so relevant to obviously you know, this is a year ago now that we recorded this episode, probably a little longer. It’s sixth sense. We didn’t have a podcast. I’m like, alright. We’re talking about account based marketing. And, of course, it hits, and we get a a decent listener. So I actually did on my particular AI journey, I did get a AI summary of this one because I did not have time to go back and listen to what I believe is probably about thirty hours of content or two hundred and fifty thousand words as I mentioned from the transcript. But we talked about just the overall trend the the transition. We talked about ICP. That was literally kind of where we started. And also, like, what I thought Casey was talking about was the alignment between sales and marketing and trying to negotiate that of, okay, like Yes. Where are we gonna focus? Who are the accounts? Because account selection should not be, hey. I was driving home, and I saw this billboard. We should go after that. It needs to be data backed, which he had a really, really strong perspective on. Again, yeah, if you go on LinkedIn, ABM is dead. But a lot of companies are are making the shift from MQLs to an account based world. Casey is a multi, you know, time six cents customer, so it’s it’s a great validation of our platform and what it can do to make that journey successful. And then, of course, the program that you build around it, aligning with sales, developing the ICP, and just really measuring even. And and he also spoke about getting the entire exec team and the organization on board, which is, again, this is a reselling change here. This is not an overnight, you know, shift. And so it was really thoughtful and really well delivered, and I think he just hit on all the key points. And so I’m glad I’m glad that’s the top listened episode. And I think, you know, because it’s in it’s the top one, obviously, the fact that it was one of the earliest plays into it, but there’s been consistent listening. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it it’s it’s interesting because, like, we we didn’t know what this was gonna be. Right? This is the part of our reflective that we’re gonna talk about ourselves for a little bit, but we had no idea. And so we’ve been able to to really grow an audience and the feedback we get this is the thing that’s amazing to me too. Like, I get messages on LinkedIn. We now have PR firms reaching out to us, asking for people to be on, and that’s just everyone out there listening and sort of resharing in our little video clips and all that. And it’s just it’s really great. Thanksgiving is around the corner. I’m really thankful to the listeners for giving us a chance, for spending a little bit of time with us, listening to our rambling and and my bad jokes, your good jokes, or just me laughing at your jokes. But it’s been fun and and really grateful for this opportunity and this little platform that we’ve built, and here’s to the next fifty. Absolutely. And thanks for thanks for joining coming on with me because I think it was back in it’s probably September of last year. I said, hey. Like, let’s do this. Let’s do it. Let’s go for it. So I think the last thing I’ll say is, like, you know, we don’t have any any sort of issue with guests and content and topics and all that. But for anyone who does listen a lot, I mean, definitely reach out to us and say, like, hey. We wanna hear about it. Because people reach out to us, they always saw this episode. It was great or thanks for this information. But we wanna know what you wanna hear. Right? Because that’s always the best way to get guest topics. Let’s crowdsource it. So please Yeah. LinkedIn, whoever, smoke signals, that might be harder, but you could try it and let us know. Let us know. This is this is something we have a lot of fun doing, but we we put it out there for our listeners. And so we would love to hear more from you. We’ve recorded this now, obviously, in our homes and also on a main stage in London. That was very fun. And also in a podcast booth on the trade show floor. So we’ll see where the adventure takes us next, Adam. Thanks for being part of the ride. Thank you. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.