The Attribution Episode

I’m absolutely not saying throw out technology because technology can help you get really great data points. Just remember, it’s not the end all and be all. And you’ve gotta take that ten thousand foot view of it. I feel, by the way, for this episode, my, like, volume is higher. I’m just, like, so passionate about this topic. I don’t know if this is your happy place or if this is your occupier. It’s my happy place. It’s my happy place. Yeah. But at the end of the day, the tools can help you predict likelihood, obviously, to create an opportunity. They can help you understand the health of your opportunity and likelihood to close. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by six cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. So, Saima, here we are. We’re back again, and we’re doing another episode with just us. So to our audience It’s you and me. Oh, you know they love it. They love it. That’s really why they tune in. They only miss you guys, I think. That’s when you tell yourself at night, Adam. Right. They said, you know, not only are you alarmingly handsome, but the insights are truly amazing. No. That was what I told myself in the dream when I woke up in a cold sweat. But we’ve got something, I think, that’s going to get people going in a good way and maybe in a bad way depending on the You know what? It’s a topic that I get asked about at least once a day. Once a day? That’s a lot. Yes. That’s why Because I talk to a lot of customers and prospects and folks in the industry and, yeah, at least once a day. And that topic is attribution. We’re going there. We’re just taking it on. Can this be the definitive episode and the definitive sort of I don’t see why not. I mean, it’s certainly definitive in the sense that we’re gonna go deep into it. I think we just put it out there. It’s the definitive episode. And let’s just start maybe with a bit of credibility. Like, I’m gonna talk about myself and then Adam Go for it. Twenty years of building and leading analytics teams. I’ve owned data science at public companies. I’ve built any version of an attribution model that there could be. We’ve tried, I think, between the two of us, probably most of the tools that are out there. We have a POV that is rooted in experience, I guess, is all I’m trying to say. Yeah. And I mean, I’ve been in B2B marketing for eighty four years. So I think I bring no. I mean, I’ve it’s been over twenty years. It’s to your point, presenting information. It’s trying to bring back ROI. It’s using tools and the result being I think we both have a pretty strong point of view on it. We’re not gonna solve the argument here. This will be the definitive episode. Anyone who watched this, like, they’re good. We’re gonna cover it. But, yeah, we’ve definitely been at this for a while, and I think it’s some attribution is probably responsible for some of the grays that I have for sure on top of my head. So with that, let’s dig into let’s say, what is one truth, a core tenant, the tagline, if you will, for this attribution topic. Okay. I’ve got it. Are you ready? I’m ready. One hundred percent of what your company closes is influenced by marketing. What that is absolutely right. I agree a hundred percent. Right. There is not a single deal that is being closed that isn’t touched in some way by marketing. Nobody’s gonna buy your product or solution without at least hitting your website, consuming some form of content. Every study under the sun has come to this realization that at least seventy percent of a buyer’s journey is anonymous. It’s taking place before they’re going to reach out to you. Talk to a seller, talk to anyone from your company. Where do you think they’re educating themselves? That is what marketing is doing. Marketing is curating that journey. Marketing is bringing folks along the journey, educating them, being in the places that your prospects and buyers are, making sure that they’re getting relevant content. They are able to understand all the options that are out there. I mean, so much of that heavy lift comes from marketing. So I’m saying it. A hundred percent of your bookings are influenced by marketing. Why don’t we just stop? I think we’re done. We’re for many Thanks, everyone. Thank you. No. This would be the definitive and short episode. Yeah. One thing also that sort of borrows to the idea that perspective, pick a way that you’re gonna measure and then one of those tenets assuming that everything is one hundred percent influence and stick with it, it’s not gonna be a hundred percent right. You’re never gonna be able to know what and you can’t measure everything. Right? Obviously, there’s that ongoing conversation marketing, and I’m sure our CFO would want to be able to measure everything. And anyone’s CFO is gonna come back and probably look for that, but you’re not gonna be able to do it. But with this stuff, with this attribution, pick your point of view, pick your numbers, pick your metrics, and lock it in. Lock it in. And, again, as somebody who’s been steeped in the data world, nobody’s data’s perfect. It’s a false dream if you’re chasing that dream. And so identify the metric that works best for your business. First touch, last touch. I don’t care. Multi touch attribution. I don’t care. W shape model. I don’t care. Pick one and stick with it and use it consistently. However, that’s not to say there shouldn’t be other versions or views of the pipeline and attribution truth, but those are not views or truths that you share broadly. Meaning, a pipeline number is a pipeline number. There is one source of truth for the pipeline. It is a source metric that comes from that one methodology that you pick. Any other view of the pipeline, which you should be looking at the health of the pipeline, you should be looking at all the touch points. Let your rev ops team, let your analytics team be the one that’s looking at all those variations, and don’t have them report out a different pipeline number based on that. If we use last touch, we source this much. Or if we use equal touch attribution, we actually can attribute this much to a campaign. No, let them look at it and let them come back with the insights and with the, so what of that example, digital advertising, maybe you’re not sourcing any deals, but it’s probably involved in like whatever that number is, fifty, sixty percent of all the bookings. That’s a great insight for someone to take away. This is not a sourcing play, but it’s there in fifty percent of our wins. So we’re gonna continue to put budget time and effort against this initiative. That’s the type of outcome you wanna have them drive. Not let’s put this dollar value against this specific ad. You mentioned those w shaped and u shaped, and I think it went through an implementation of a tool once, and I don’t know if I was doing attribution or if I was watching real fortune because it was, like, all these lead letters. To be honest, I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t smart enough. And then it was, like, attributing thirty four cents on the dollar to this and twelve cents on the dollar to that. And it just was like, how is this real world? And it was not didn’t make any sense. I think one of the things also you talk about in terms of the pipeline in one view, there’s also this, like, what are your go to market motion and what your outcome is? Right? So if you’re in a heavy MQL lead based world, you’re gonna measure this and report on this in a very different way than if you are in the count based strategy. So even to your point about advertising, if your goal is to generate downloads all day long from content form fills, and you start talking about digital ads that haven’t led to seventy eight conversions on that, like, right or wrong, you’re gonna get some stares versus, like, hey, we’re trying to progress accounts in an account based model, which you and I talk about seven hundred times a day. Yeah. Then it’s a very different story. You have to know what to measure based on the way you’re going to market. And I think sometimes and even my own interactions with our own customers and our folks, they’re sort of hybriding it a little bit. Like, well, we’re making this transition, but we’re still measuring this. And it’s like, well, if you’re trying to influence accounts, why are you measuring leads? So Yeah. And I think maybe this is like a second fundamental truth here that there’s never just one thing that sources a deal or creates a deal. Right? When we say pick a version and go with it, let’s not abandon the fact that it takes multiple touch points. It takes hundreds of touch points depending on your sales cycle and the complexity of the solution that you’re selling to actually go win a deal. But when we say pick one, we’re really talking about a consistent methodology to measure and report out on your pipeline and also plan by the way, what your pipeline needs to be like. All of these are tenants of a well oiled go to market motion. And you have to put a stick in the sand at some point to say, this is what we’re gonna do, and here’s how we’re gonna measure it. Keeping in mind that, of course, it’s not just one thing. Right. And I think cutting back earlier, we mentioned tools, and you mentioned touch points. I think one of the things that those tools are doing a really good job of right now is understanding what is that journey. Ad views or clicks from an ad, organic search, paid search, and understanding what actually are those three hundred and seventy eight thousand touches that are happening along the way to help you make better decisions. Okay. Well, on eighty percent of our deals, we’ve seen every single deal has got at least one paid search interaction. Well, clearly, there’s an investment there that you wanna continue. Keep doing that. Yeah. Exactly. I mean and I feel like it’s so obvious, but it’s not because it also can be tricky to get that full picture of the journey. Yeah. And, again, let it will never be full. But to your point, the tools do a great job of capturing the data. They do a great job of putting it into context, meaning what types of activities happened pre opportunity, what types of activities helped post opportunity, really finding what good looks like, the anatomy of a great successful deal. Like, those are the types of things that you really wanna be driving through those tools. Like, we’re not saying don’t use the tools. Absolutely. I think what we’re saying is don’t use the tools to calculate that one twelfth of a five hundred thousand dollar deal should be attributed to this campaign because guess what? When there’s another touch point tomorrow, that one twelfth turns to one thirteenth. And so that’s not a way like, you can’t have this dynamic version of pipeline that is being reported out to the board and reported out to your teams, and you’re actually drawing plans. And so use the tools, take the goodness from the tools, but, again, keep it in context. It’s all about finding the winning patterns Yeah. And then making sure that you’re investing in those things accordingly. And then those tools are not gonna tell you, like, for example, people are watching this very episode right now, and when they’re done, they’re all gonna visit us and they’re all gonna wanna talk to us. And it’s gonna generate millions and millions of dollars for the business because this is the definitive episode. Well, it is. And no tool is gonna tell you, hey. So and so listened to revenue makers and then came in and wanted to talk to you. Then there’s so many other things that happen out there. Right? Again, your point earlier about Advert, they saw an ad, but if they didn’t click on it, some of the tools might be able to tell you there was an impression, but there’s so many things out there that you’re doing. And that goes back to tenant number one about what was it again? Marketing influences. One hundred percent of your pipeline and bookings. Or you could say a hundred percent of your pipeline comes from your podcast. No. I’m sorry. Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent. But again, I think you’re never gonna catch everything, and those are obviously blatant examples of it. You never will, and you never can. And there’s been thoughts out there about like throwing out every tool that you have and just putting an open text field on your contact us form that says, how did you find out about us? Again, that’s a great data point and it’s not gonna be complete as well because of in terms of what people remember, what their first touch point was, or what portion of people are actually gonna fill it out, or how deep are they gonna go? I mean, all great things to, again, understand the anatomy of a good deal and what’s working, but you’ve gotta find the patterns and put it together. Yeah. We actually our research team, Carrie Cunningham, who was a guest some episodes ago talking about our buyer experience report, are in the process as we speak working on this very topic, doing a survey about marketing attribution, understanding what folks are actually measuring, what they’re not measuring. And I got a little bit of a preview of some of the numbers and I do not wanna steal the thunder of that report coming out. But one of the things that was interesting is that you’ve got any number of companies that are doing account based strategy, going to market account based, but they’re actually not measuring on the accounts. And we talked that a little earlier, but defining that and then the success criteria as well. This is something that, you know, in the world that we’re in, we’re having these conversations a lot, but let’s dive in a little bit. Let’s get actionable for some folks. You think about, like, if you talk about account based because that’s what we do, what are some of the, in your mind, the hot sort of this is what you need to be measuring If you’re in an account based world, there’s probably a thousand of them. Right. We know we measure, but like, what do you think is maybe the two or three that are most like, woah, those are the ones you gotta have. I mean, it depends, you know, what stage of the account you’re looking at. Is it early pre opportunity? Is it post? Couple ones I’d say, you know, pre opportunity, you wanna make sure number one, you’re reaching those accounts, meaning you’re getting in front of them through your account based programs. Yep. And then secondly, of course, our folks engaging with those activities and initiatives. So reach and engagement are two key ones. And then there’s operational things you wanna look at. Do you have contact coverage on those accounts? Do you have the right personas? Are you engaging with them and multi threading across the board? How many touches have you had? So many kind of different leading indicators. And then as you move into an actual opportunity being created, qualified, and going towards actual close, it’s all the sales touch points. It’s all of the air cover campaigns. It is number of contacts that are actively engaged, number of meetings, all these great sort of leading indicators of is this a healthy deal? Is there still intent showing? Are they actively engaging? What’s the response time of their emails? I mean, if you wanna get crazy, I’ve been in worlds where we’ve looked at the outbound response time of us responding to our prospects and then how long it takes them to respond back to us. And there’s again, I’m absolutely not saying throw out technology because technology can help you get really great data points. Just remember it’s not the end all and be all. And you’ve gotta take that ten thousand foot view of it. I feel by the way, for this episode, my, like, volume is higher. I’m just, like, so passionate about this topic. I don’t know if this is your happy place or if this is your Octagon. It’s my happy place. It’s my happy place. Yeah. But at the end of the day, the tools can help you predict likelihood, obviously, to create an opportunity. They can help you understand the health of your opportunity and likelihood to close. But I really, really like taking a step back at the end of each quarter, pulling out that list of accounts that you actually won, those net new logos, and then just looking to see what collectively those accounts cared about, which campaigns those accounts engaged with, which topics they were interested in and were researching, which web pages they consumed. So many great data points. How many people were involved in those deals and just publish a closed one analysis every single quarter. And by the way, don’t just just publish it to the marketing team, publish it to sales, publish it to CS so that the entire revenue team is on the same page about what it takes to win a deal. And by the way, we’ve been doing this for probably a year and a half now. And just between q four of last year and q four of this year, the number of people it takes to win a deal has doubled for us. There’s b to b inflation. I mean, I think that was probably one of our first podcast episodes, and we didn’t have that insight back then, but it’s taking twice as many people. It’s taking more activations. It’s taking more and more and more of everything. Right? And if you go into a quarter and into an account and a deal knowing that and having that sort of context set, you’ll approach it very differently. And so when you know better, you will do better. And so we take those datas and those insights, and we put them in to our operating model. If we know it’s gonna take more people, we’re gonna build that into SLAs with our BDRs. If we know it’s gonna take X number of touches or this combination of touches or like a mix of digital and physical, we’re going to plan for that as we plan out the year. So the data is again there to allow you to apply better strategies to what you wanna do, as opposed to reporting out on a slide that it was this many millions of dollars against this one content syndication play? Talk about just a number of contacts a little bit too. Because, again, we talk about as b to b inflation. You sort of you can’t think all of that increase in context was definitely started from what happened to be just a change in the way companies buy in the last eighteen to twenty four months because of the economic change and all that, but not unlike normal inflation. Right? So nor inflation’s petering off, but it’s not like, oh, inflation’s over, so prices are gonna go back down. It’s just the same thing. Right? We now this number of context the wave companies have bought has changed. They’re not going back. Oh. So that’s a good example of obviously taking the data, adjusting your model, but there’s gonna be something else that’s gonna happen next. Keeping that in mind, plug it into your model. And, again, like, we talked about picking one and sticking with it, but that doesn’t mean, you know, putting on blinders and not thinking about, okay, like, there’s something has changed in our business, something has changed in the environment, and revisiting it and understanding, okay. Like, we are gonna start measuring here both from a it’s an attribution measurement or just a measurement as a whole. I mean, we could go off into, you know, a whole other world separate from just pure attribution. Totally agree. And like a well informed go to market team is a more effective go to market team at the end of the day. Right? The more they know, the better they’re gonna prepare for it. And going back to, you know, picking one source of truth for pipeline and one methodology, There’s also just a simplicity to it that allows for better understanding and having that data permeate through the revenue org. If you’ve got four versions of pipeline and an influence number and a source number, what number do people look at? What number do people plan towards? What number do people say mid quarter? Are they gonna hit their number or not? Like, you need a single North Star for everyone to work toward. And so you can’t discount just the simplicity and the ability to really have a whole team galvanize around one source of truth. And so let’s not discount that. Yeah. I don’t know how many times I’ve been in situations where I brought a report and sales brought a report, and they weren’t the same. Oh my god. And we’re both at fault. Right? Because we didn’t align. You know, I think in those situations of a small company, we didn’t have a centralized, like a person at least, or part of a person helping to call and bring in all the data. But that gets out of hand. And you know who really loves it when you do that? Boards. They’re just, they love it. Oh my gosh. I know. Is presenting and then marketing is presenting and they’re like And fine. Yeah. Exactly. A different number. And, usually, it’s finance going like, you know, these two schmucks are completely off their rockers. Here’s the real numbers, but it’s just that happens, and it’s not good. Yeah. And they ruined your day. So Yeah. And we’ve hit so many points here, but, again, the simplicity is key. And when you do, by the way, apply multiple different models, which again, I think there’s a time and place for that. And there’s ownership within the teams that know what to do with that data. Keep in mind, we’re almost going back to the bad practices of MQLs. Right? Like, let’s give this many points to this and, you know, we’re gonna get first touch this many points and like the midpoint has to be, you know, sixty percent of the dollar value and like the last touch. Well, that’s so important. So we’re gonna give this amount of weightage to it. It’s a little bit arbitrary. And so understand all the touch points along the way, Understand that even all the things you can see is probably not the full picture. And so what are you gonna glean from what you do know and how are you gonna make everything better for your marketing, your sales, your CS teams, your BDR teams, and just have them work with what we know. And I think something that we have not put out on the show that I think it’s time to like MQLs are bad. They’re bad. I don’t like them. I’m sorry to people out there, but there’s a better way. There really is. We could actually have that debate another time, but actually wouldn’t really be a debate. It would just be you and I screaming about how That’s a problem, by the way. We agree on a lot of things, Adam, and so we gotta find a topic that we are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Yeah. I mean, I was hoping that there was gonna be something here today, like instead of calling this the definitive attribution episode, it would be like the attribution showdown or deathmatch. But I don’t know. Maybe we should start talking politics, but something tells me we’re probably not Probably. Too far off there either. So, you know, I think about content a lot. You mentioned earlier the seventy percent of the buyer’s journey being anonymous and then you think about, okay, what’s the ROI of content and how do you measure the ROI of content? And again, going back to tooling, you can see, okay, this account or this person within the account viewed this blog post or somebody searched for this term and landed on this blog post and they requested a demo. And all that data is important. And fortunately, working at Sixth Sense, I don’t have somebody breathing down my neck saying, like, you spent this much on content. What did you get for it? Right? Now I’m just gonna say that to start. No. Don’t do that. No. Don’t do that. But plenty of people are getting that. And again, content being something that can be expensive and it’s massively important. My view on it is, again, it goes back to what was that number one tenant again? One hundred percent. One hundred percent. One hundred percent. And what’s a huge influence is content. They’re gonna be on your website or someplace else where you’re publishing content. But do you have any thoughts on it? On is there a way to go in and go? Do you wanna go deeper or do you not need to? And again, like to your point earlier about looking at all of our closed won opportunities for a given period, we can see what content we engage with. Is that enough? I probably will say early on in my analytics career, I erred on the side of just downloads, views of every single asset just to be able to prove the ROI on it. I don’t think you need to do that because, again, it’s almost part of running the business. You have to be keeping content fresh. You have to be bringing in new POV. You have to own thought leadership for what you’re selling and what you’re doing. Right? Those are just basics at this point. I think the winning patterns is a key play, and I’d say look at the top five, ten, twenty, most viewed, most downloaded, most consumed assets, or most engaged with assets by your close one logos. But also if you want something early on, like maybe you’ve got a new piece of content out there and you haven’t it it’s not part of a closed one deal yet. Right? Because it’s just it’s only been out there for a few weeks. Look at some of those leading indicators. Obviously, traffic to the page, but even more importantly, ICP web traffic to the page. Is it resonating with the audience that you care about? That’s really important. Is it hitting on topics that did surge in your last winning patterns closed won analysis? Great. You’re starting from a very different sort of place than just, you know, looking at raw downloads, which by the way could be completely meaningless because some marketing class asked their students to go, you know, write a paper on something that just happens to be covered in that latest blog post that you just wrote. Yeah. It’s really interesting because there’s so many points of view out there about content and now, like we’re getting into a world of cookies going away. So now it’s getting even harder to track what you used to be able to track. Right? Like, I probably get an email every other day from a various ad platform or something saying like, okay, well, you’re gonna lose this, you’re gonna gain that, or you have to do this, you have to do that. So I think it’s getting to be more and more obvious to me now that the influence that we talk about, the hundred percent again, is such a great mentality to take. And two, starting to rely on other factors, understanding like where people are coming from and understanding those touch points along the way, but you’re not gonna be able to get that very, very granular experience like we had once cookies are gone. So it’s kinda lends itself back to the first thirty seconds of the episode. Yeah. We didn’t talk about this, and maybe we should have started with this. Like, why did attribution become a thing? And I think it became a thing because in the early days of ads and digital advertising, people needed to show some sort of tied back to revenue. I think we’re so far beyond that now. We understand that our marketing mix is going to include all of the things. Right? It’s gonna include digital. It’s gonna include physical. It’s gonna include webinars. It’s gonna include ads. It’s gonna include, at some point, I’m sure some drone shows. Right? That’s been part of our marketing mix last year. So all the things. Right. And so by forcing marketing to go down to report on the nitty gritty of each, you’re actually taking away that strategic offer that marketing is providing like marketing has a seat at the revenue table. They are contributing more and more to the bookings and the pipeline of a company. Let’s not nickel and dime them. Let’s elevate the conversation. Talk to what the overall impact is, how much marketing is bringing in again from that one source of truth for pipeline, and then set goals and stretch goals against that. Yeah. I think back to the idea of being stewards of the pipeline. If you’re going into whatever meeting you’re in, if you’re going to present to just your team or you’re going to an exec team, it’s a board meeting, whatever it is, If that’s what you’re presenting, if you’re talking in the weeds about those particular metrics, you’re not gonna have credibility to be able to say, well, so not everything is measurable versus, hey, here’s where we are with the pipeline overall view. Here are the key channels that are contributing. And you’re responsible in a sense to elevate that conversation. Right? You can’t just expect, oh, you’re in a leadership role, this is where you’re going to be because different people operate at different levels. So if you find yourself doing that and feeling like you’re under the gun from an ROI perspective, think about what you’re presenting and think about how you’re having those conversations and think of yourself as, you know, we say it here internally and we’ve talked about it in multiple episodes, like own the number, own the pipeline. You don’t have to generate everything, but have that conversation and raise your profile, raise how you’re presenting, and you’ll find things are probably gonna change. Yeah. It’s not really a debate, but there are marketing leaders out there who are still asked by their board and by their CEOs to report on MQL metrics to report on, you know, specific things Other than sending those board members and CEOs this podcast, what else do you think they could be doing? How can you start to change the narrative? It’s gotta come down to a first of all, just showing up the effectiveness of it. If you are tracking that, I would say, and I I don’t wanna go this far with it, but you’re probably challenged, and you’ve probably seen conversion rates off. Three percent conversion rate from MQL to close one, if even. Yeah. And has anyone ever come to you and said, man, our MQLs are awesome, and we’re continuing to follow-up, and it just generates us billions and millions of pipeline? No. So, you know, I had an experience where we made this transition from a lead model to and you’ve I mean, you went through this. I don’t this this is nothing new. And And I don’t know if I’ve told this story before, but it was my first board meeting at this company. One of the board members had a his iPad, the first gen iPad, I guess this is probably like two thousand sixteen, twenty seventeen is thick iPad. And he had a picture. He had a little, this little triangle. He’s like, I want this. And I struggled to put it together, a, because it just wasn’t being it wasn’t even set up right. I mean, this was a startup and we were trying to to figure things out. But when I started going to conversation about look like these are converting like this and we’re seeing fall off in conversion, we’re going to switch to a focus on accounts. These are the benchmarks that we’ve seen out there. This is the first test that we’ve done and we’ve already seen an increase in our qualified meeting or opportunity, you know, whatever the metric may be. Right? In our case, it was our BDRs, we were able to book a ton of meetings but they would fall off very quickly, they just weren’t qualified. Once we sort of made that switch, we were seeing thirty percent increase in those opportunities moving to qualified which was massive especially when you’re Series A, Series B, you make that kind of change in conversion. It’s a different ballgame. So I think boards will get on board. Boards will get on board. Yeah. Boards will get on board. Leadership’s gonna get on board. The data is your friend. The benchmarks are your friend. And it’s not going to happen overnight. Yeah. But it will happen. Yeah. And if it doesn’t, then you can go and be a professional podcaster like us. That’s a different story. Yeah. I totally agree. I think the data has to be your friend. It has to tell the story. And also think of the burden you’re putting on your buyer in an MQL world. They have to understand their problem. They have to know that you solve their problem. They have to find your website. They have to find the contact me form, fill it out, and then they have to sit and wait for you to give them a call. Like there’s a better way. Right? So there’s so much friction and burden number one being put on the buyer. But secondly, what about all the other buyers that didn’t get there? They didn’t take even one of those five, six steps that I just showed. There is a world out there of accounts that are actively in market for your products and solutions. You’re doing a disservice to your company. If you are not going out and proactively trying to get in front of them. And that’s why we hit so much on the importance of not relying on the MQL and really just understanding that ICP, informing them, educating them, leading them down that buyer’s journey so that hopefully when they do finally raise their hand and are ready to give you a call, it’s you that they call and not your competitor. Meet them where they are. Right? And it’s gonna pay dividends. So I think we could go on for hours on this. I’m sure people are not gonna listen for it for hours. The drop off rate would be very high. I actually have a question. I wanna take a little flip on our normal question. So having done this for so long with the data and the analytics, what’s the most ridiculous data or analytics thing you are ever asked to do, both net positive or negative on our usual question? I have it’s like the funniest thing, and I know exactly what I wanna say. So part of being in, you know, running analytics is you have to be that objective third party, right? There’s no emotion. Like the numbers are the numbers. You’ll give the context, you’ll give the historical trends. You’ll try and tell the story of why the number is good or bad, or if it’s bad, it’s really not so bad and we’ve got a plan for it. But I once had a leader look at the slide that I had prepared for the board and the number was red. We were just not near the goal that we had, and so it was on the slide in red. And the leader said, can we just change the color of that to green? I mean, such a simple question, but I was like, what? No. Like, I felt, like, so morally burdened by that one. So that’s hundred percent the most ridiculous thing I’ve been asked to do. So they just light green or they figured they could alter reality by changing the color? I think I negotiated down to let’s just leave it black with all the other texts on the slide to just read, but it is not a green. I’m sure you were very judicious or democratic in your approach on that. So I tried. All right. I’m going to cut it off the definitive episode. It’s done. It’s done. Send it to your CEO. That’s it. It’s done. So thank you. I enjoyed our debate. Another one of our without a guest episodes, everyone out there, and I will see you back again soon. 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.