Funnel Reboot

Episode 233 In the 2009 movie "Up" there's a golden retriever whose collar can translate his thoughts to speech. When Dug the dog first starts speaking, the main characters marvel at how smart he is, but expectations drop a moment later when he snaps his head around and halts mid-sentence when he hears a squirrel. We marketers are prone to Squirrel-chasing. Let's be honest and admit that we get caught on a treadmill of activity without stopping to ask ourselves if it's having an impact. How do we break this habit? This month's book says it's by creating a Go-To-Market plan with detailed tactics. A plan reminds us why we're sticking with those tactics, so we don't get distracted by any tactic that comes along. Our guest has an MBA and 25+ years of marketing leadership experience in the US and Europe. Her consultancy, Transformation Insights, offers Fractional CMO services that help companies grow by building go-to-market strategies that are consistent and effective. She is also a speaker and the author of The Marketing Growth Formula which came out in late 2025. Let's go to Miami Florida to talk with Heidi Hattendorf Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

It goes without saying that the purpose of sales and marketing is to help a company grow. We create forecasts where revenue grows a hundred-thousand, a million, or 10 million dollars. But we expect to achieve that with incremental changes to our resources and tech-stacks. When Base 10 Math is used to express numbers that differ by orders of magnitude, we use exponents, noted with the letter N put in superscript (N stands for the Latin word numerus or number). N to the power of 5 is equal to a hundred-thousand, N to the power of 7 is equal to ten million. We don't have to raise N very much to see it balloon in size. Each increment it jumps by represents its value going up by a factor of ten. The question of how we reach scale then isn't how to change financial numbers by a basic percentage; it's how do we grow them by a factor of N? Our guest knows how sales and marketing can scale their organization without snapping them. *come with their own jargon like batch mode, local vs global maximums, and WIP bottlenecks. He graduated from the University of New Brunswick with an engineering degree and then went into technically heavy roles, working in IBM's semiconductor division. He pivoted into leading sales and marketing teams for tech organizations until the late 2000s, when he founded a product startup with an app that helped salespeople gain visibility into their funnel activity. He also teaches sales practices and scaling up in the engineering faculty at the University of Ottawa. Join me now as I sit down in person with the head of Ottawa's Scaling Up initiative, Peter Fillmore. Chapters/Timestamps 00:00 Intro 02:10 My guest Peter Fillmore 03:27 What Changes When You Scale 05:37 Making the Funnel Visible 08:58 Sales Fundamentals and Urgency 09:55 PSA 12:03 Saying No and Off Ramps 13:26 Marketing Segments and Messaging 15:31 Discipline Metrics and Cadence 22:53 Connect with Peter & Ottawa Scaling Up Initiative Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 229 We need to talk about what's been happening with the use of AI on Google and Meta's ad platforms. A few years ago, we were surgeons. We had the scalpel. We chose the exact keywords, the specific bid modifiers, the precise placements. Now? Google and Meta are basically telling us, "Hey, don't worry your pretty little human head about it. Just give us your credit card, a few grainy images, and a vague 'goal,' and we'll take it from here." Performance Max (PMax) and Advantage+ are the ultimate "Trust Me, Bro" of the marketing world. They've turned "manual control" into a dirty word. They want us to believe that the algorithm knows our customer better than we do—even though that same algorithm once tried to sell me a pair of shoes I bought three weeks ago. The platforms are no longer just tools; they're aggressive backseat drivers. Google is constantly "recommending" that you switch to Broad Match (conveniently spending your budget faster). Meta is hiding the "Manual" button behind three layers of "Are you sure? This is less efficient!" warnings. The "Auto-apply" Trap: If you don't uncheck a box buried in a sub-menu, the platform will literally change your strategy while you're sleeping. They aren't optimizing for our ROI; they're optimizing for their inventory. It's getting a little ridiculous. It feels like we're being slowly evicted from our own accounts. AI is a great engine, but it's a terrible pilot. It has no "common sense." Media buyers aren't here to fight the machine; but they are there to keep the machine from driving a brand off a cliff. After gaining her B.A. from Butler University and working in B2B, she had her first brush with digital channels like SEO and paid search and saw how they could drive business better than traditional methods. That came as a pleasant surprise, given how her sales role relied totally on making cold calls. Bringing that sales-focused grit to DTC, and honing her digital expertise over the last 14 years, she now serves as its CEO. When she's away from agency business, she is likely to be spending time with her husband & two sons, often at Wrigley Field catching a ball game. Let's go to Chicago, to meet Lyndsey Maddox Timestamp Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:05 Lyndsey on whether experts still matter 04:51 PMax Leads and Nuance 09:55 Honest Forecasting with Clients 15:41 Humans in the Loop 24:22 Agency Size and Fit 30:00 Connecting with Lyndsey Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 226 Positioning is an element that's so foundational to Marketing, it's taught in every introductory class alongside the "Four Ps" of marketing. Positioning is meant to describe the choices a brand makes to maximize how the market sees it. Positioning is very powerful because it can set perceptions that drive customer loyalty, strong demand, and the willingness to pay a premium price. But if all this is true, then why is the landscape littered with examples of where brands have flopped—cases where brand positioning actually caused a product to fail? Take Microsoft Zune: Because how people thought of MP3 players had already been set by Apple Colgate Frozen Entrees: Sure, both food and toothpaste enter our mouths, but other TV dinner brands don't plant the taste of toothpaste in your head. Harley-Davidson's "Legendary" Cologne: People buy a fragrance for the impression they want to leave, not one whose name evokes burned rubber and gasoline. Cosmopolitan Yogurt: There are plenty of brands in the dairy aisle. People didn't think a fashion brand belonged there Frito-Lay Lemonade: Marketing a salty snack and chasing it with a "Thirst-quenching drink" strikes people as a cynical cash grab The reason these brands flopped is they tried positioning themselves on a competitor's turf. The correct way to position yourself is to start with customer needs and work outward from there. To do this right, we've got to flip the traditional concept on its head. Instead of positioning, the author we're talking with today says we must deposition our brands. He is the founder and chief strategy officer of brand strategy firm Fazer. Over three decades, he has led strategy for Fortune 500 companies as well as venture-backed disruptors. His work has been featured in the New York times Forbes and MIT technology review. Let's go now to New York City to speak with Todd Irwin. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Thinking up a new product and commercializing it is not easy. All products face Financial, Technological and of course Competitive market barriers. But doing this in the field of Healthcare is not like any other industry. In healthcare, there exist extra regulatory hurdles that make product innovation even more difficult. Before every medical device is introduced, they must find academics who will research them and publish articles that are heavily scrutinized by peers. Then they have to endure clinical screening before receiving government approval, which applies tight restrictions on what you can say about the product and how it's used. After they enter most markets, the products must be coded so insurers will reimburse patients who use them. So if you have a health or medical technology product, how can you market it when you face all these limits?" For the first time here, the mic will be in somebody else's hands. That person is Cindy Grabowski, founder of Mind Grove, a US-based training platform built specifically for MedTech professionals. Have to disclose that I have no affiliation with Mind Grove, other than giving them a no-charge review of the marketing course on their platform. Anyway, she turned the tables on me to hear me answer how you can market in the Healthcare space with so many constraints. As I present my points on healthcare marketing, listen for tips on: Building your digital assets throughout your product's lifecycle Setting up campaigns on digital channels without breeching privacy Engaging your patient population to create your content for you Getting buy-in from decision-makers on upgrades to your marketing program. So give this unique talk I have with Cindy a listen - I imagine even if you aren't in Healthcare Marketing, you'll come away with better ideas on how to overcome your own constraints. Let's go hear how we can navigate around constraints. Timestamp Chapters: 00:00 Introducing Cindy Grabowsky 01:07 Glenn takes a turn as guest on the show 03:09 What we'll cover in Healthcare Marketing 04:33 The Big Question: Why is Healthcare so hard? 06:38 Leveraging Data in Healthcare Marketing 09:56 Case Study: EndoGastric Solutions 17:27 Optimizing Digital Presence and Compliance 33:57 Skills for measuring, managing Healthcare Marketing Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

We often hear marketers talk about how vital their work is to sales. What we don't hear nearly as often is the reverse: how essential sales is to a well-functioning marketing team. If marketing creates the content, sales provides the context. And that context is what makes campaigns relevant, credible, and grounded in the real world. Sales teams feed marketing the on-the-ground truth—what prospects are actually saying, how they react to new pricing, and how they interpret a company's positioning in different segments. That's especially clear when a business serving the SMB market tries to move upmarket. Sales hears almost immediately how enterprise buyers perceive the brand, revealing the gaps marketing must close for the company to compete at that level. It's a live feedback loop marketers can't get anywhere else. Bridging those gaps requires real collaboration—sitting in on each other's meetings, sharing insights early, and recognizing that both functions are cogs in the same revenue engine. Their shared job is to keep that engine running smoothly. Our guest today understands that better than most. He's a fractional leader of revenue and go-to-market teams, and host of the Revenue Problem Solvers Podcast, where leaders drop the script and speak candidly about what it really takes to build growth teams. He's known for diagnosing the true cause of weak team performance - something he knows well from playing intervarsity sports. He gets frontline performing again too, using a coach's tone to get them back on track. And he doesn't restrict this just to his day-job, this Southwestern Ontario native spends his weekends behind the bench as a minor hockey coach. Let's go talk with Karl Ortmanns. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Here's a question a lot of us are asking ourselves today. How do marketers build genuine, durable trust when the cost of generating massive volumes of AI content is basically zero? How can you argue for making humanly-crafted content in small quantities When it's so easy to have AI pump it out in big quantities? The hard truth is that humans are wired to notice what other humans do. Meaningful communication with buyers contains elements that just don't scale - this takes more than a trivial amount of work. But that is precisely why you need to do them. A new book came out in 2025, called Human Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI. Even though Gen AI that's all around looks set to marginalize content marketing, this book predicts that AI's knock-on effects will bring old retro practices back into vogue. If Wired Magazine were to meme it using their Wired/Tired/Expired phrasing, it might say that Humans Interacting with no machines = Expired Machines Monopolizing Interactions = Tired Human-Human interaction via Machine = Wired The book also argues that marketing & communications folks have to make different types of content for segments of the buyer journey, all held to different goals and different time horizons. Don't dump random content on social channels. Like instruments in a score, your pieces need to work together—not add noise. It also said being Human-Centered extends to where and how we use our messages. Our leaders have to go to trade shows, make podcasts, meet people, and have real conversations. Trust grows when customers feel seen and heard. The author of the book is by day, a speaker and is currently Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Canva. By night, she's a Singer, actor, and fitness fiend. Let's go to Northern California to talk with Ashley Faus. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

For any professional, life often presents unexpected challenges that test our resilience and strength. The Ottawa-based marketer we'll hear from today, has had an extraordinary journey, For those born with congenital heart defects like Danny Covey's, surgery isn't an if, it's not even a when, it a HOW MANY. Without undergoing them, they have no hope of living to adulthood, Danny has had eight of these life-threatening operations. But throughout all that, he's displayed unwavering courage. His emotional and physical scars have shaped him, but they have also given him insights that he shares in his book, "Scar Tissue." And whether your difficult situations have come on the operating table or in the workplace, you'll appreciate the unique perspective Danny brings. Let's get ready to reevaluate our perception of weaknesses and why they might be strengths…with Danny Covey. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Artificial General Intelligence is a term that most of us have heard, a good number of us know how its defined, and some claim to know what it will mean for the average marketer. Here's what OpenAI's Sam Altman said "It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI." What nobody knows for sure is when it will be here. Some said that GPT5 would herald the dawn of artificial general intelligence. This episode is airing In mid-2025, and GPT5 has come out…and it is not widely believed to have AGI. Our guest says AGI is a long way off, and more importantly, that it might not be the sought-for milestone we need for AI to be a revolutionary force in our lifetimes. Today's guest takes us through what it will take for AGI to truly arrive. We also talk about public vs private models, Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, the Branches of AI like Foundational vs generative, Agents and Agentic Workflows. Today's guest graduated from DePaul with an MBA, has headed the AI/Analytics groups at (EY) Ernst & Young, Gartner, CSL Behring and now at the Hackett Group. He has written several books and is here to talk about his 5th which came out in 2025. So let's go to Chicago now to speak about "The Path to AGI" with its author. Let's welcome back for the 4th time on this show, more times than anyone else, John Thompson. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Sometimes, to reach a solution, we must take unfamiliar paths. In the early 1940s, a brilliant mathematician named Abraham Wald left his homeland in Hungary fleeing the spectre of war. He moved to the United States, and became part of a team at Columbia University tasked in 1942 with an aspect of the war where the Allies were losing badly to the Nazis. It involved the many Allied planes that would leave from England but never return to their bases, having been shot down somewhere over Europe. These B‑17 and B‑24 bombers had 10-man crews, weighed up to 30-32 tonnes, had wingspans of 100-110 feet, and were defended by machine guns planted along the plane's entire length. Despite all this, they would lose planes every day, presumably because they'd taken enemy fire and either crashed during their campaign or as they headed back over the English Channel. Wald's team had to determine how to minimize bomber losses. They had been poring over aircraft returning from missions, mapping out the distribution of bullet holes across their fuselages. Their plan seemed logical — reinforce the areas with the most damage. But Wald saw what others missed. Wald realized their sample set of data represented the survivors — the aircraft that had taken hits and still managed to return safely. There were other planes they weren't examining, ones at the bottom of the channel or in occupied territory, that didn't make it back. This lack of data could be biasing them to look at the problem backward. The planes they couldn't sample could have been struck in areas that were more critical. Maybe the fact they were hit in those vulnerable spots was the reason behind them crashing and that the lack of damage in those spots on the surviving bombers simply meant they'd been lucky! the returning planes weren't the rule, they were the exception. Having flipped the problem around, the planes received reinforcements where the damage must be catastrophic, and from them on many more B17s and B24s completed their missions, helping the allies to victory in Europe. Some people call what Wald showed intuition, but that's not what saved the allied bombers. Even though his approach seemed counterintuitive, data guided Wald to the solution. This is Funnel Reboot, the podcast for analytically-minded marketers. Today's episode goes outside our comfort zone, showing statistical tools in the hopes we'll get a bit more comfortable using them. Our guest today is someone who uses the same kind of critical reasoning - and statistics - to make sense of their product marketing problems. He is both someone who implements analytics tools, having configured over 500 sites, and one who posts prolifically about what he's learned. He has also taught analytics at several New York colleges, and speaks at regional MeasureCamp events. After earning his MBA from Pennsylvania Western University, he spent about 20 years in corporate analytics. Then in 2017 with the support of his wife and three daughters, he set up his own firm, Albany Analytics. Listen now as he teaches you some tools that might help in your own marketing programs. Let's now go hear from Ateeq Ahmad. Note: Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Most of the leading AI companies tell us how wonderful their technology will make our lives. In a recent post put out by OpenAI's head, Sam Altman called The Gentle Singularity, he says "We will figure out new things to do and new things to want...Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we'll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other." Of course, these new things need to be marketed and sold. Sam has good news there too, saying: "Generally speaking, the ability for one person to get much more done in 2030 than they could in 2020 will be a striking change" This all sounds wonderful; it's used so heavily by Silicon Valley, it's been given the title of Effective Accelerationism. It's essential thesis is that AI will cause progress all by itself. So we should just let it take over? Are we willing to bet our livelihoods on that? Where we are here in 2025, it's a challenge to do sales and marketing work using AI. Very few know how to run entire functions with Generative AI, which is why Sam qualified his 2030 prediction by saying that "many people will figure out how to benefit from [AI]" by then. How do we unlock AI's activation in customer acquisition? How do we get out of the starters blocks? I had the chance to moderate a panel discussion on "Gen AI Activation in Marketing & Sales" at an amazing event hosted by UC Labs and TCC Canada - please get the links to each of them in the shownotes. The panel featured myself, Lubabah Bakht, Gary Amaral, Jim Cain, Peter MacKinnon, and Brett Serjeantson, zig zagging through everything from day-to-day challenges to legal and privacy concerns to the lack of skills barring our progress. I count myself fortunate to not only share a panel with these experts, but for being able to call them friends. And now, please listen to these experts on Activating generative AI in marketing and sales. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 209 When it comes to initiatives humans undertake, we only need to look at a few to see how they can fail spectacularly. One example: The iconic Sydney Opera House came from a competition won by a young Danish Architect. The board who'd commissioned him to build it was told it would be completed by 1963, but things were so chaotic and so behind schedule, he had to be fired. It is truly a marvel of design, but it's a posterchild for poor projects because it didn't open until 1973. Another example: Out of a desire to research high-energy particles and potentially solve the fundamental of physics, the US Government set out to build the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). A site in Texas was chosen, but after 6 years they had only tunneled a fraction of the 88 kilometres, when the project was cancelled at a cost of $2B. A last example: In 1998 NASA's Mars Climate Observer travelled about 200M miles and was about to start researching the red planet. But the software setting its orbital altitude had been given imperial units instead of metric. This error in the code made it come in too steep, destroying the $328M probe. These failures are so huge, it's bound to bring out our inner cynic. It's natural to pose questions of those leading the projects, like: "what were they thinking?" I don't scoff at the people who headed these projects, because I experienced something in my youth that showed me how humans sabotage missions. When I was 15 I attended a camp that took us through exercises to cultivate teamwork. I thought I knew what teamwork was; I was not prepared for what awaited. Two twenty-something Senior Counselors named Leo & Bob were in charge of it. We left the camp which was in rural New York State and drove in a van a few hours away. The van crossed into Pennsylvania, left the highway for a sideroad, then onto a dirt road and finally to a clearing somewhere in the backwoods. It was early afternoon by the time Leo dropped us off, leaving 4 of us and Bob to calmly walk for about 30 minutes, and we stopped to relax in a clearing in the forest. At that point, Bob stood facing us and told us about this simple exercise we were about to do. He said, 'you are stranded in a forest a few miles from a stationary van which contains food and medical provisions. You have to locate the help, which will signal its location by a horn-blast every 15 minutes until sundown. You'll succeed in your mission if you reach the van by then. He didn't tell us what would happen if we didn't. All of this seemed doable, until Bob said one of your team is incapacitated due an injury.' and then he closed his eyes, fell to the ground, and didn't say a word. I's hard to be to say what the next couple of hours was like, as we tried to find the van, carrying this 180lb man through the brush. Suddenly, it became important to recall the way we'd come, or how to lash branches together to form a stretcher, or whom among us should decide which way we should go. Each time we heard the horn, we felt a bit more exhausted and acted a bit more panicked, knowing that the horn-blasts would stop and we'd resort to screaming in the dark. The way we interacted with each other in every way, from rational to tense to hysterical. At several points in the day, I was convinced we'd never get to the van. But by some miracle we reached the van just before sunset. Each of us had time during the trip back to reflect on how we worked as a team. I no longer wonder why people have difficulty collaborating on projects, especially as the stakes get higher. My guest also believes it's our fault that projects fail as they do, and she's got principles she teaches that make everyone clear on the task we're all undertaking, significantly improving odds of success. She is founder and CEO of Spring2 Innovation, is an award-winning design thinking and innovation expert, as well as a TEDx and TEC/Vistage speaker. With over 25 years of experience, she has driven innovation in telecommunications, application development, program management, and IT, helping public and private organizations shape strategy, drive change, and launch new products and services. Let's go now to speak with Nilufer Erdebil. Chapter Timestamps 0:00:00 Intro 00:06:38 Welcome Nilufer 00:10:16 Poor design in showers and on projects 00:20:12 customers' unspoken needs 00:25:07 PSA 00:25:40 Devoting more of our time to communicating 00:28:49 Mistakes stemming from bad Workflows 00:37:39 Is our UX as disorienting to customers as a foreign language? 00:43:12 AI's potential role 00:47:55 About Nilufer, book Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.

Episode 207 Those of you who know me outside of this podcast, know that if I'm doing anything that involves advertising, whether it be in a classroom or a consulting setting, I think of ads as a complicated puzzle that is never fully solved. While it may not have a predictable outcome, there are a few key principles about it that are always true. I've picked up these lessons one at a time, either by studying competitors or through the brands that entrusted me to run their ads—sometimes through painful trial and error. The models and principles that emerge from this process become a valuable piece of baseline knowledge, allowing you to make case-by-case decisions. However, it's hard to pass these insights along to others. They're often too abstract, and the examples become stale and dated as campaigns retire. Does this mean anyone wanting to adopt this perspective on advertising must go through the same process I did? Not necessarily. Thanks to someone with a gift for brevity and illustration, these principles have been distilled into a book. As I leaf through its pages, I'm delighted to see many concepts I've known given clear shape and an easy-to-remember form. Our guest graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He uses imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life. He's one of the nicest authors I've had on, and he's back on this show for a third time. Let's go to England to speak with Dan White. Timestamps/Chapters: 0:00:00 Intro 00:02:27 Welcome Dan 00:04:40 Oldest known advertisement 00:09:18 Uber's clever transit ad 00:11:15 Positive and negative impacts of ads 00:22:47 using advertising to build brand asset 00:23:49 PSA 00:30:46 Many ways ads can tell a story 00:33:19 How brain perceives messages 00:37:43 Learning about ads through metaphor 00:45:45 Getting the book or contacting Dan For links to the people, products or concepts mentioned in the show, head to episode 207's shownotes page on the Funnel Reboot website.