Bullhorns & Bullseyes Podcast

Season Finale

Guests: Tom Nixon & Curtis Hays
October 22, 2024

Episode 40
In our final episode of Season One, Curtis and Tom discuss the chief takeaways and biggest lessons learned from our first season. Listen in as they break down the big three: 1.) the importance of messaging hierarchy, 2.) the role of systems in marketing, and 3.) the necessity of aligning metrics with objectives. (Hint: Not everything should be measured as pass/fail.)

Takeaways:

  • Reflecting on the journey of the podcast and its evolution.
  • How does “WHY-HOW-WHAT” align with the “AIDA” sales funnel?
  • The importance of KPIs in measuring marketing success.
  • Sales readiness is crucial for converting leads into customers.
  • How to align metrics with messaging and methodologies to maximize marketing efforts.
  • Brand building is essential for long-term business growth and short-term lead generation.
  • Sales training can significantly improve conversion rates.
  • Aligning marketing and sales efforts is key to success.
  • Budget allocation should reflect the sales funnel stages and map to the desired outcome of each stage…not JUST sales or conversions!

Tom Nixon (00:02.594)
Curtis, they say all good things come to an end. We’re hoping that this was a good thing, but here we are coming to the end of season one of Bullhorns and Bullseye.

Curtis Hays (00:13.002)
It was definitely a good thing. mean, can you believe we put together 40 episodes plus a bonus episode? My first time podcasting, we did that all in about 12 months or so. It was a lot of work video, audio, you know, all the recordings and, scheduling, you know, playing, playing the role of producer, playing a little creative role.

Tom Nixon (00:20.172)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (00:40.878)
It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been a lot of fun.

Tom Nixon (00:41.016)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and we managed to resist the pod fade phenomenon at least so far. Yeah, we got through our host.

Curtis Hays (00:52.494)
Describe that for me. What’s the pod fade?

Tom Nixon (00:55.184)
The pod fade is when people go into a new podcast with all the gusto and energy in the world and then they realize that there is work and that the returns aren’t as immediate and as obvious as one might hope, you know, in a world of delayed gratification. That’s not a world many live in nowadays. So then they eventually fade off and then there’s three weeks between an episode and then four weeks and then eventually it just fades out to nowhere. We did take a hiatus, but we explained that in a couple of episodes why we did that, but we are not fading.

Curtis Hays (01:21.229)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (01:24.726)
No, and I think the big differentiator for us was when you and I made the commitment to release an episode every Tuesday, which we did after, what was that, like episode seven. And, accountability, man, makes all the difference in the world.

Tom Nixon (01:36.684)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (01:40.856)
It does. Yeah, I would recommend that to anyone who was thinking of starting their own podcast to definitely find some way to hold yourself accountable. Commit what you can commit to, but then stick to whatever it is you stick to. And here we are. This is our 40th episode. Plus, you mentioned a bonus episode. So technically 41. But we’re calling this episode 40, the last episode in season one. And we thought we would maybe take a look back at the very beginning like we did sort of last week with Mario and.

Just recap what we think our high level chief takeaways are from season one. think things that we’ve learned from our guests, things that we’ve learned from each other and things that we’re learning just along the way in our day to day profession.

Curtis Hays (02:22.936)
think that sounds great. If you’re ready to dive in, I’m ready to dive in.

Tom Nixon (02:24.524)
Good. I’m ready. I’ve got like three sort of major topics that I wanted to cover. And there’s lots of nuggets and nuances in between, but maybe I’ll start with the first one. And I wanted to expand on a concept that people have been listening all season or watching all season long. It’s going to sound familiar. And that’s this why, how, what messaging hierarchy.

I hope I saw I was gonna say I hope I don’t sound like a broken record But I actually hope I do because I think if you get one thing right in terms of messaging and branding It’s always positioning the messaging in this hierarchy I wanted to read to you you don’t mind a blog post that I put up in July people may have missed it because it was vacation time But have you ever seen the movie the Fisher King?

Curtis Hays (03:07.15)
I have, yeah. It’s been a while. That came out in the 90s? Did that come out in the 90s? Yeah. Okay, yeah, early.

Tom Nixon (03:08.086)
Yes. So if you’re… Yeah. Yeah. I was in college. I think it was 91. Yeah. Robin Williams, Mercedes Evers rule and who’s the dude? Jeff Bridges. So it’s a parable within a parable. And it’s sort of this turning point in the movie. Finally, the Robin Williams character tries to explain to the Jeff Bridges character what he’s been telling him all along, which is you’re sort of missing the forest for the trees.

And I think this is true of a lot of marketers and a lot of people doing messaging is they sort of skip past. They missed the obvious. And so if you allow me, I just wanted to read from this parable here real quick and just see if this resonates with you. Then I’ll explain kind of what I took away from it. I called this the marketing holy grail. That was a little click baity title, but it’s about the holy grail. There’s a fisher king. So Robin Williams asked Jeff Bridges, did you ever hear the story of the fisher king?

It begins with a king as a boy having to sleep alone in the forest to prove his courage so he can become king someday. While he’s spending the night alone, he’s visited by a sacred vision. Out of the fire appears the Holy Grail, a symbol of divine grace. And a voice calls to him and says, you shall be the keeper of the grail so that it may heal the hearts of men. But the boy was blinded by greater visions of a life filled with power and glory and beauty. And in the state of radical amazement, he felt for a brief moment, not like a boy, but invincible.

like a god. So I reached into the fire, took the grail, and the grail vanished, leaving him with his hand in the fire to be terribly wounded. Now as the boy grows older and the wounds grow deeper, one day life for him has lost its reason. He had no faith in men, not even himself. He couldn’t love or feel loved. He was sick with the experience and he began to die. This is the important part. One day a fool wanders into the castle and finds the king alone.

being a fool, he was simple minded. He didn’t see a king, he only saw a man alone and in pain. So he asked the king, what ails you, friend? And the king replied, I’m thirsty and need some water to cool my throat. So the fool takes a cup from beside the king’s bed, fills it with water and hands it to the king. And as the king begins to drink, he realizes his wound has been healed. He looks, it’s the holy grail, which he had sought all of his life. And he turned to the fool and said, how could you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?

Tom Nixon (05:29.92)
And the fool replied, I don’t know. I only knew that you were thirsty.

So my takeaway and how that could possibly apply to what we’ve been talking about for the last 40 episodes is I think many make the mistake of not the fool, but the king. And that is they’re focused so much on their jewels and the rewards that they put forth a message that says, take my jewels. They’re so valuable. Have them, have them. And they’re missing the whole point, which is the person on the other end might not want jewels, might just be thirsty and need a drink.

How would you know what they really want unless you ask them? And this goes back to the why, how, what methodology. The why your customers are thirsty for something, right? So lead with that. Don’t lead with your jewels. Lead with the why that you are thirsty. And you will gain the favor that the fool did in part by the king. So did that make any sense at all?

Curtis Hays (06:28.448)
It does. If I could share a story then, which I think probably explains what you’re describing here is I was talking to a prospect a couple of weeks ago and struggling with conversions. Numbers are down across the board. They’re still getting good traffic numbers, but they can’t convert on the website. Their revenue is down and they’re looking at new vendors. So we’ve been brought into the mix.

to take a look at their advertising and, you know, we’re essentially asked the question, how would we increase conversion rates? Right. And their prize is to increase revenue. So that’s, that’s what they’re looking at. This big prize of we’ve got to get our revenue numbers back. And, I essentially said, there is no secret to what I’m going to do. There’s certain levers I can pull and certain approaches that I could take.

And he starts throwing out different ideas of how we would approach ad copy and tactics and all these other things. And I said, can you stop for a sec? Can I ask a question? The previous agencies that you’ve worked with or. Yourselves your, own company. Have you guys ever taken a moment to go and ask customers why they buy from you or better yet? Have you asked those who.

come and don’t buy from you why they didn’t buy from you and maybe bought from somebody else. And he looked me straight in the face, obviously amazed probably in surprise that he didn’t think of that, you know, himself, but in, in how correct that, you know, question was because they’re stuck in the state of just throwing ideas up against the wall, hoping something’s going to stick. And the, the

to magic with magic in the Holy grail, right? Is what you’re saying. The magic is in the ask, right? And so there is where your answer is. So just stop for a second and go and ask your customers. And, you probably have a better way of saying the, you’ve had a couple of phrases of how you put that of go and ask first. but it’s, but it’s so true.

Tom Nixon (08:46.942)
said one of the things I said early on in the season was go ask it on the mountain. Remember that little quip? And I think what most brands do is they go tell it on the mountain, right? It’s like, that’s why we’re so great. And it goes right past the prospect because unless you’ve got an alignment either on that because you’ve researched it or you’re just lucky, then you might be talking completely over somebody’s head. Like all the kings men who are out searching for the Holy Grail. What they didn’t realize is and why your prospect or your clients probably laughed is because it is like

Curtis Hays (08:51.66)
Yeah, yeah, that’s right.

Curtis Hays (08:55.822)
You’re right.

Tom Nixon (09:16.482)
Foolish like the simplicity of the fool was I didn’t know any better. just. You looked thirsty so I gave you some water so obviously a lot of times you don’t. You can’t be a fool. You have to go do the hard work which goes back to I think one of a core concepts of the season was when you discovered and share with me in the book. Forget the funnel. A customer driven approach to driving revenue at the end of the day is about revenue, right? Let’s not be simplistic but.

this customer centric approach is the go ask it on the mountain and just taking that time to say, let’s forget everything that we think we know about how great we are and go ask the client what they need. What problems do they have? Where does it hurt? Where are you thirsty? And I think if people do that, then the marketing and the messaging, certainly the messaging becomes much more easy because it’s, it’s data driven. It’s like, you’re not guessing. It’s like the company that you mentioned or companies like that.

They feel like it’s gotta be a game. Like they gotta figure out, let’s just try things until we see what works. Well, you can do that and maybe you’ll get lucky early. If you don’t, you’re gonna pay a lot over the time of learning in the hard way where you could just stop and do what the authors of that book of spells and say, just go ask people. So that’s my big takeaway.

Curtis Hays (10:28.812)
Yeah, I think a lot of these marketers, and I’ve mentioned this before, just the digital age that we live in, you know, there’s all these promises of this tool, increase your conversion rates or build a landing page this way and you’ll, you’ll increase by X amount. And you know, that, that like there’s best practices or there’s certain things that you can do or one thing that will just magically make everything all better. And.

While some of those things might be able to do what they say they’re going to do. And there’s certainly best practice in that none of that’s going to work unless you’ve done this one thing first, which is understand why your customers or companies buy from you. And, that is all understanding their pain and understanding how you, you know, fix that pain and finding the right way to, to communicate that value proposition to those prospective audiences.

Tom Nixon (11:27.66)
Yep. think a few years ago, the magic wand was digital. we’re to do digital and that’ll fix everything. I think now there’s a danger in the new magic wand being AI. Is this AI driven? Like, you know, I had a friend in a client who said, you know, we’re moving everything to AI. We’re doing everything with AI. And I happened to mention completely out of context in another situation that I would caution brands against relying solely on AI to draft content for them for a bunch of reasons.

Curtis Hays (11:33.005)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (11:57.876)
And that person took this to me. so we shouldn’t do anything with AI. OK, well, then let’s not do it. I thought we were supposed to. Let’s not do it. It’s so obviously the answer lies somewhere in the middle. But it all goes back to starting with the customer. that’s takeaway number one. I wanted to move to takeaway number two for me. But I’d like you to sort of explain it because you’re better at this than I.

The first lesson out of anything we’ve listened or that I learned this season was from Mario in our first three episodes. And that is the importance of having systems across the organization, but certainly with your sales and marketing. And I know you’re a big systems guy. You have the engineering brain among the two of us. So you could probably expand why is it important to have systems and then what, how do you move from a guessing, throw things at the wall type of situation to now we’ve got systems in place to execute measure and track.

Curtis Hays (12:51.52)
Right. Yeah. I mean, I would recommend to people if they’re just catching, you know, this episode or they’ve caught the last few to not just go back and listen to the Mario episodes, but Amy Schuster, and, Amy Schuster is a fractional CMO. What she actually said about audiences, just circling back to the Y messaging when they develop ICPs, one of the things that they do is, like don’t.

Tom Nixon (13:03.479)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (13:19.202)
Don’t treat those ICPs as just avatars. Like those are real people. Those are your customers. So you just, you have to get into that framework again. But, so what she said when it comes to systems, right, is to sit down with sales and marketing and actually, you know, plan these things out. So it started with first of all, shared terminology. So make sure everybody’s on the same page. So we know what everything is. What’s us.

Tom Nixon (13:24.214)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (13:44.194)
Yep, huge.

Curtis Hays (13:48.898)
marketing qualified lead, what’s a sales qualified lead, all of that shared terminology. On top of that, what we would maybe call the tech stack or the marketing stack. What are the tools that you’re using to do all of these types of things and do these tools talk to each other? Does everybody know how to use these tools? Shared data across the tools. What data are we getting out of the tools that help us make decisions?

And so, you know, these, these systems become critical in starting how you’re going to build out any sort of marketing that you’re going to do so that you can capture leads as they come in, they can go to the right people. You can take data and pass it back to other platforms like Google or Facebook to inform their algorithms. So really, you know, that, that stopping for a second, understanding all the systems that.

you’re using from a sales and marketing perspective, make sure everybody understands how those systems are being used. And that’s going to set you up for success. A hundred percent.

Tom Nixon (15:00.854)
Yeah, totally true. I think if Mario were here, if I could put words into his mouth, he would also point out that systems aren’t necessarily technology, which they certainly are. As you just mentioned, are also processes. And one of the things that I love about what you insist upon in working with clients is this sort of mutual accountability between the sales and marketing team, which doesn’t always exist. And this was another big recurring theme is that there needs to be a system or a process, even if it’s just on paper. Cause obviously technology will help facilitate this, but so that there’s this.

Curtis Hays (15:09.698)
Totally.

Tom Nixon (15:30.602)
circuitous closed loop that continually goes back and feeds itself information, data and outcomes. And that could be just a process in terms of like a company policy. Like we’re going to have this meeting. It’s going to be weekly. Sales is going to report to marketing, marketing is going report in that. Just having that accountability removes a lot of this guesswork that we’re talking about because we’re looking at data real time every week and we’re reacting to it.

Curtis Hays (15:55.896)
Correct. Yeah. There’s two keys to success, I think with technology. One is training. So if people don’t know how to use Salesforce or HubSpot or you’re working with an agency and they’ve given you a consultant who only has a year or two experience, they maybe don’t have the training and sophistication you need for your company. Right? So training’s number one, whether you should ask of that, of your vendors, of

how competent are they with the activities they’re doing? And then how competent are your internal employees to use those? And then second to that is accountability, which in and of itself is a system, what you’re talking about, right? So you set up these systems of accountability with your vendors, regular check-in meetings, agreeing on KPIs, and again, these shared terminologies, and then regularly checking in on those things. And then doing that with…

your, your internal staff and employees that, that if you have this feedback loop, you’ve got employees on the other side, whether it’s sales, whether it’s customer service who are part of the revenue opportunity, right? As everybody, as a company that really helps to generate the revenue. And so, making sure that you have systems in place. So everybody understands, Hey, if I’m manually entering data in these systems, I got to know how to do it.

I got to make sure I’m doing it and, you know, likely there’s either an incentive if I do it right, or there’s some sort of regular check-in where somebody’s overseeing what I’m doing to make sure I’m staying on top of it. And, I, yeah, I think those two things are, I’ve seen tens of thousands of dollars spent to implement a tool that then nobody uses and it’s just money out the door.

Tom Nixon (17:47.286)
see it all the time. Yeah. And that tool can be super powerful, but a lot of times non-compliance isn’t because people are lazy or they don’t want to change. They just haven’t been trained. You just, you need to invest in additional, whatever it is in the integration consultant. Because if you don’t do that, whatever, it might be a little, it might be a lot. I don’t know. It depends on what you’re trying to integrate, but if you don’t, then it’s just a waste of money. I you mentioned this accountability and

I wanted to go back to that for a minute because one thing I think I heard you say, or maybe it was Mario, or maybe I’m just making this up and hallucinating like AI. And that is you can’t be afraid of the truth. Like the truth will set you free. And I’ve heard you say, I think, that if there’s bad news to report on the sales front, I want to know it. I don’t want to just shy away from it and hope the marketing is working. I want to know that these leads are bad because we can change things until we get the right leads. Right.

Curtis Hays (18:45.292)
Yeah, this is how I got into marketing. So I was in IT, we had a marketing division. It was kind of moving over to help that marketing division. I was sitting into meetings with clients that were my IT clients and were now marketing clients. And I was watching team members build presentations and then present presentations that weren’t whole truth. They would…

Tom Nixon (19:12.46)
Eh?

Curtis Hays (19:13.966)
You know, if we had a bad month in SEO, let’s say, right. And our traffic went down. They would skip that graph and, you know, try to add some other statistics to make it look like a good month. They weren’t fudging the data. They would just sort of skip over the fact that their things declined. Right. And, and, you know, at the end of the day, the decline might’ve been completely out of your control. Right. It may not have to do with performance is what I mean that the.

Tom Nixon (19:29.462)
like this.

Curtis Hays (19:43.478)
The dip could have been an algorithm update. It could have been a seasonality change. It could have been an issue on the technical side.

Tom Nixon (19:53.112)
Could I add, it might, sometimes a dip is good too. So if you’re hiding the truth. So let’s say you’re getting fewer leads, but all of a sudden your quality of lead is going way up. That’s a good thing. Like, but you might be hiding the wrong data just for the wrong reasons.

Curtis Hays (20:03.669)
Right.

Curtis Hays (20:07.49)
Yeah. And so, you know, to me, having worked in IT, truth sort of mattered because truths were like break or fix. Like if there was an anomaly, something maybe was going to go down and that was going to cause a bigger problem. Like you just didn’t ignore problems in IT infrastructure because usually problems ended up snowing ball, snowballing or a problem.

Tom Nixon (20:24.684)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Curtis Hays (20:32.948)
led you to like, start at the lowest common denominator. You discover a problem and it’s like, if anyone’s ever told you, have you tried rebooting? Cause you should just start with the lowest common denominator. Don’t go for the most complicated solution first, go with the simplest solution and work from there. And so there, there’s a, there’s a problem solving technique within that. And so when you start looking at data, it’s very similar. So your problem solving, when you’re looking at data and to say, okay, well, what does this mean? And so.

Simple steps first would be data integrity. Is this accurate? Let’s go look. Okay. It is accurate. you know, what changed, was it again, you could start looking at things like seasonality year over year. Did we have the same experience in September last year as we’re seeing this year, you know, different things that could lead you to deduce what could potentially going on. And where I saw the opportunity was to say, look, you could never improve.

You know, almost like constructive feedback. Like if you’re not willing to address the constructive feedback, you never have this opportunity to improve. And you think that everything’s just unicorns and rainbows, but in reality, what the customer cares about and what they all started, they didn’t care about search impressions and ranking keywords and all this other data we were showing. All of these clients kept asking, where’s my ROI? Which meant where’s my revenue?

Tom Nixon (21:55.864)
for us.

Curtis Hays (21:58.454)
That’s what they cared about. So if you understand what’s happening in the data set prior to revenue, you can make changes that hopefully eventually is going to get that client to revenue. And that’s what I set out to fix. How could we track all this stuff and then use tools like HubSpot, a Salesforce to track it, Google analytics, and then give visibility to the customer. And then the last piece I’ll say is then it’s a shared accountability.

So I saw these marketing teams going in and showing all this data, but then never asking, well, okay, the good things that happened, like leads we sent you, what happened with those leads? There was no shared feedback. And well then, you know, it’s like, we’re only looking at our own data. We don’t see data at the other end. And it’s so short-sighted then at that point, that I just felt like, wow, this could really be a huge opportunity. And of course now.

12 years later, feel like almost everybody’s doing it.

Tom Nixon (22:58.902)
Yeah, well, I don’t know about that. It might feel like that to you because you’re any client that works with you. Going back to that example that I interjected with is that if you’re hiding from the truth or obscuring the truth and you’re afraid to show a dip in say leads when really the true data would reveal that there’s fewer incoming leads, but better quality leads. If you try to fix that, you’re going to screw up what was actually a positive trend.

Curtis Hays (23:01.454)
But they’re trying to. They’re getting closer to doing it, I’d say.

Tom Nixon (23:26.262)
Right. You’re like, well, we got more leads, you know, and then all this garbage comes in and salespeople are trying to track down bad leads again. And then the quality lead goes down. And then you don’t ever want to hear back from, you know, it’s crazy. We talked about it at length. I won’t go into it again, but the fact that sales and marketing don’t want to collaborate more than they typically do is it’s it’s insane to me, but it’s a recipe for failure, I think.

Curtis Hays (23:50.904)
Yeah, I’ll just add another story. So I was talking to another prospect a couple of weeks ago who said, Hey Curtis, if we spend this money with you and all this money with Google ads, how many leads could we get? And I, and I said, what’s that? Yeah. Billion. And, so I gave him some numbers of not what I think he would get, but what other similar

Tom Nixon (24:04.514)
Billion. You said a billion.

Curtis Hays (24:20.11)
clients in his industry get for similar dollar amounts and said, but that doesn’t generate you revenue. The leads that I bring you don’t generate revenue. Your salesperson generates you revenue. So I said, first of all, who’s the person at the other end of the phone who’s answering the phone calls that come in. Those are your leads or replying to the form submissions. First entry into your brand, sort of speak outside of the website and then the salesperson closing the deal.

Like at the end of the day, if I only got you five and you had a hundred percent close rate and you closed all five versus me sending you a hundred and you couldn’t close any of them. I mean, so it’s a shared responsibility when you’re doing this. And it’s that shared responsibility that’s part of the system and accountability that I think oftentimes gets lost in sales and marketing. And you’re going to find success when you have that shared responsibility.

Tom Nixon (25:19.596)
Yep, exactly. And it should be said, guess, for people who don’t know, most of the clients that we would work with do not purchase at the, you know, there’s not a point of sale at the end of a lead, right? It’s not, swipe your credit card and, you know, put it in the cart and check out. It’s a little more complex than that. So this does sort of segue into the third takeaway, chief takeaway that I wanted to bring up. It almost feels like it’s a blanket that drapes across both legs of the stool that we just talked about.

Curtis Hays (25:33.251)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (25:46.592)
And that is the power of why or why you would lead with why, and then having systems. And that is the importance of metrics. I think we really kind of brought up the aha moment two episodes ago, the one just before Mario, when we made the distinction between lead gen, demand gen, lead capture, all of these activities and how important it is to match not only the messaging to where people are in the sales funnel, but also the methodologies to where they are.

And it’s, I think it boils down to everyone wants measurement. Like you said, everyone wants ROI. I think the problem becomes when you measure ROI, success or failure, pass fail, did somebody buy or not? And not every activity that a marketing person or a marketing campaign is executing is set out to necessarily sell. So what we have for science was you need to measure the right things at the right time of the right people. And it’s going to change.

There’s this whole spectrum of like, well, the sales funnel, for example.

Curtis Hays (26:49.666)
Yeah. Yeah. So I would go back to the, the, the shared definitions. So starting with process, if you, if you, if you know the why, how, what you, you marry that to how your communication plan was going to be, I think you would call it a marketing playbook. Right. So that playbook has these stages, awareness, interest, desire, some sort of action or conversion define what’s happening inside of those. And then.

Tom Nixon (26:54.946)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (27:19.374)
in those stages where the prospect journey is what’s helping them get from one stage to another stage, and then marry and test your messaging inside of those. And that’s going to tell you what key metrics. So I did this with a Facebook advertiser to today where we are now measuring some new things on the website and we’ve got a middle funnel. actually called the custom event we created in Facebook middle funnel.

Tom Nixon (27:47.383)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (27:47.426)
There was three actions on the website that we felt like a user would take if they were middle funnel. And we created a custom event for that, that we’re now pushing to Facebook. So he’s got a second set of messaging that he’s going to put if people are middle funnel. That we think helps move people from one stage to another stage. It’s the type of education or information they need if they’re going to make that leap from interest to desire. It’s kind of where we’re at. So.

None of that really makes a whole lot of sense until you, kind of map it out. And that’s where I think the processes, the systems, the definitions, all of that, if you can create that playbook to stage all of that out, it makes it really easy then for the business owners sort of comprehend what you’re doing. And then it’s like, well, why do we have this budget here and this budget here? Like it’s less hesitant to be like, we just need to drive traffic to the website. So let’s just put all of our money over here and more traffic means more sales. It’s like.

Maybe, maybe, but.

Tom Nixon (28:46.914)
Yes.

Tom Nixon (28:50.52)
I just want to jump in because yes, I’ve come across situations where it’s like, let’s drive more traffic to the website. So that’s an activity. But then the measurement becomes, where’s my ROI? Right. Which is a different sort. You’re measuring a different thing that you’re actually designing for. And the reason I said it drakes over, maybe it drakes over everything that we’ve been talking about for years, because all of these things map the exact same way. your sales funnel, unaware to aware.

from aware to interested, interested to desire. Now I want to take an action to then taking an action. So if you picture that funnel right at the top is that why? So if they’re unaware of your product, they might even be problem unaware or that they’re solution unaware, let alone they got to know that the category exists perhaps, or they have to know that your brand exists. So all of this is happening sort of pre-funnel. If you are executing all your tactics to convert the unaware to a purchase right away.

A, you’re taking a huge leap, right? It’s probably not going to happen. And you’re also measuring the wrong thing. The first goal is to make the unaware aware. There should be an action there, an activity. It’s probably some form of broadcast Tom Nixons. Now we’re back to why we named this podcast Bullhorn Bulls Eye. There’s broadcast activities, bullhorn activities to make the unaware aware. The measurement is not did they buy? Yes, it’d be wonderful if they did. The measurement is then how many became aware. You could measure that, right? You can either through survey data or you can

Curtis Hays (30:01.283)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (30:17.181)
visits to the website or engagement on an ad, those things indicate awareness, Different message, different methodology, different metrics. Then as people going back to your middle of the funnel activities, once they’re in the funnel and they’re in some sort of consideration phase, they’re either interested or not, or their desire to buy the product or not. And the goal of the marketing there then is to move the aware into some sort of desire.

different messaging, different methodology, different metrics. Not yet, did they buy? Did they want to buy? Are they staying longer? Are they coming back? Do they have something in a cart? All of these things indicate desire. Then now you’re at the bottom of the funnel and now you’re targeting with probably more bullseyes activities to say, let’s convert these people. We know they’re raising their hands. We know they’re close. This is the type of message they need. This is the methodology that they need. And now the metric becomes, did they convert?

All of that should be mapped. I also, started with why, how is it the middle of the funnel? Cause they’re in consideration. They want to know how you’re better or different than the field of competitors. And then the what is there got the thing in the cart and they’re trying to figure out what comes with it and what does it cost? And I’m saying that proverbially. So it all plays together, right? And that’s why you say, should a company like literally map this out on a whiteboard or a paper and say, you know, he almost could overlay him. Like remember those old transparencies where you’d lift.

Curtis Hays (31:41.26)
Yeah. I think what we’re going to do this with the client towards the end of the month, we’re going to go sit down with a client where we’re talking about our 2025 strategy. And I said, Hey, do you have a whiteboard? Actually, do you have construction paper? She’s like, all those tablets that we can put on an easel. I was like, yes, let’s use those. And if they were transparent, even better. I know exactly where you’re going with that. That would be really cool. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (31:42.784)
All maps together,

Tom Nixon (32:00.577)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (32:04.224)
Exactly. Yeah. And then then it’s not you’re not getting the worst by ROI again. You’re if you’re measuring a outcome that isn’t aligned with the thing that you’re doing to the people who are you’re asking them to do it. It’s like it’s always going to look like failure. Right. I spent X thousands of dollars and I only got this amount of purchases. Yeah, that probably makes sense. And you can’t even tell me that those purchases are because of the activity that you did, because there’s no tracking in between there. Right. So anyways.

that I think. Yeah. Good. So stop talking.

Curtis Hays (32:35.598)
think you explained it perfectly. And well, there’s a key lesson that I learned this year and you talking about this. Number one is awareness is not just brand aware. And you say it, but I feel like sometimes it’s, it doesn’t register with people. So yes, there’s brand aware, but there’s also problem aware that I wasn’t always thinking of for like, can’t just shout the brand if that person.

Tom Nixon (32:54.85)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (33:00.802)
Thank you.

Curtis Hays (33:04.098)
doesn’t realize they have that problem.

Tom Nixon (33:07.168)
Even on top of that, some people might realize they have a problem. They just don’t realize there’s a solution and are fine living with it. So if you’re in a category that is sort of cutting edge and new and novel, you have to make the unaware not only problem aware, but solution aware. And that’s an activity too. I mentioned the company, the people who are doing things, complex sort of.

Curtis Hays (33:14.104)
Right.

Tom Nixon (33:29.964)
calculations and storage all in Excel. They just don’t know a better way. And they’re fine. You know, life sucks doing it that way, but they’re like, what else am I going to do? This is what the job is. Right. So you make them aware of the solution and they’re like, okay, I’m listening. That’s a different sort of anyway. So that’s what you were describing.

Curtis Hays (33:47.394)
Yep. Yep. Exactly. So that’s a big thing I’ve learned. And then the second thing when you do this, of course, you know, in order to do any of this, you need money, you need a budget. Cause an all likelihood, a lot of these activities we’re talking about either are advertising or require creative and you know, those types of things. But some of them don’t have to be super expensive. And I think that the point I want to make is, you know, it’s a mix.

Tom Nixon (33:56.045)
you

Curtis Hays (34:17.464)
So you can’t just put all of your money at the bottom of the funnel and think that that’s going to generate a bunch of leads that, you know, maybe at the start of your campaigns, because you need to either create brand awareness or problem pain awareness, solution awareness, whatever that awareness, maybe at the beginning for the first three months, you have more budget up at the top. And as people come in and come down, you can start to allocate budget, take it out of the top.

And start to put them into those lower layers. Right? So it’s not just a, Hey, we’re going to run this campaign for the year. And this is the monthly budget associated with it, or this ads campaign with the daily budget and think that that’s going to get you from, you know, X to Y. and, this is why your agencies, whoever you’re working with, needs to be proactive within your campaigns. None of this is a set it and forget it.

Tom Nixon (35:13.602)
great.

Curtis Hays (35:14.094)
put on some campaigns and let the algorithms go, you might get some sales, but in order to be able to observe these behaviors and to do these types of things. Now I will say performance max. If you understand Google and the new performance max campaigns, it uses all of Google’s assets. Search display, YouTube discovery, and it tries to do all of this in one campaign, but you don’t have visibility into who’s in which stages. You don’t know what’s going on within those campaigns and you can’t allocate the budget.

It automates all that for you. Great. Put a small budget to that and let that do its thing. Maybe you have more money to spend. Have some control over it so you can pull the levers, set up the metrics to measure in each of the stages and see how that works for you as well. so, and I guess that, you know, coincides with expectations, right? That.

You’re going to have to, we’ve talked about patience. You’re going to have to have a little bit of patience when you’re do this to move people down.

Tom Nixon (36:17.4)
It just dawned on me as you’re describing that, that maybe season two should be more of a how theme. So we’ve talked a little bit about how, but there’s been a lot of why in this season one as I’m thinking about it. Why you might think differently, why you should do this, why you should not do that. Maybe season two, which we are promising, soon, I guess. We don’t know exactly when. We talk about how you do these things. Wouldn’t it be interesting for us to illustrate exactly what you just said with that transparency in why you would want to.

Curtis Hays (36:29.027)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (36:46.09)
allocate a certain budget here, here, here, how that changes over time. So maybe that’s what we’ll do. I think we’ve tied up season one in a tiny little bow.

Curtis Hays (36:53.39)
So are you saying that season one was why and then season two will be how? Does that mean in season two I should wear a different hat?

Tom Nixon (36:58.328)
I think I hear him saying that.

Tom Nixon (37:03.776)
No, no, no. Well, maybe. Okay.

Curtis Hays (37:05.25)
Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure we can’t bust out another hat for season two?

Tom Nixon (37:12.088)
Now you look like you’re a black hat. I was going to say we’ve come back right to where we started, so I am going to don my cap as well. So let’s see, I’ll get it done. Get it in frame here, but yeah, you wear that hat. I’ll wear this hat. Season three is going to be maybe what? So we both need those little beanies with the propellers on top. Alright, well, we should mention we are planning. We will make an announcement soon when season one commences. We’re going to do it a little bit differently, right? We’re going to do.

Curtis Hays (37:18.092)
Nice.

Curtis Hays (37:29.804)
There you go.

Tom Nixon (37:40.472)
We’re going to kick off season two with a live episode where we invite people to come on, ask questions, get answers live. We’ll have a topic set up, but that’ll be people’s chance to participate in real time, right?

Curtis Hays (37:54.402)
Yeah, I think I’d like to try YouTube and LinkedIn live and I can moderate those channels, facilitate some of the questions that come in and you know, if you’ll come back as my host, let’s do it. I’d love to do see you and make it a bit more interactive. And I think still bring guests on. I think we could still do this, maybe even live format with guests as well. We don’t know everything there is to know.

Tom Nixon (38:13.823)
Every cobb-

Curtis Hays (38:22.708)
And I tell you what, I’ve learned a lot this year by bringing on the guests and I appreciate all the guests that we had this year. And, we’ll, we’ll probably call a few of them back for, for next season, but also, get some new guests. And if, if you’re a subscriber and a listener, and you’ve got some recommendations, shoot us a, shoot us a message and let us know.

Tom Nixon (38:45.46)
even if the recommendation is yourself. You want to pitch yourself to come on. We’d love to have great minds. All right. Well, yes, I will be back. Every good cowboy needs a partner and I will be that partner. I guess until next time, not only have I donned my cap, I will doff my cap to you and say, see you next season, season two of Bullhorns and Bullseyes.

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Additional episodes:

Episode 12

Episode 12: What is Marketing Attribution?

Tom & Curtis discuss the topic of marketing attribution, the methodology of attributing a purchase or lead to its source in a marketing campaign.

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Episode 5: Aligning Sales and Marketing

Fractional CMO, author and frequent podcast interviewee Aimee Schuster joins our pod to break down her view of what ails many sales and marketing departments in organizations today.

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Episode 4: Going Meta on Bullhorns and Bullseyes

In a very "meta" episode, Curtis and Tom discuss the meaning behind "Bullhorns and Bullseyes." What are some examples of "bullhorn" tactics, and what are some examples of "bullseye" methodologies?

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