January 9, 2025 • 18 mins
This week's show is entitled, "An Operating System for Growth Marketing" and my guest is Jim Huffman, Founder & CEO at GrowthHit.
Tune in to learn about advanced growth marketing strategies and the importance of conversion rate optimization (CRO) in this evolving digital marketing landscape and:
- The necessity of identifying growth blockers
- Balancing quality and quantity in leads
- Fostering a culture of testing and failure
- The ongoing exploration of AI's potential in marketing.
Listen Now | Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript on the Heinz Marketing blog.
Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing. If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena@heinzmarketing.com.
Sales Pipeline Radio was recently listed as one of 30 Best Sales Management Podcasts and Top 60 Sales Podcasts
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
All right.
Welcome everybody.
Happy new year and welcometo the very first episode for
2025 of Sales Pipeline Radio.
I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
Excited to have you here for anotheryear of great content, great guests.
Super excited to get this ball rolling.
If you are joining us live onthe middle of your workday, in
the middle of your work weekthank you so much for joining us.
If you are listening or watchingon demand, thank you so much for
(00:27):
downloading and subscribing everyepisode of Sales Pipeline Radio is
always available past, present, andfuture at salespipelineradio.com.
Today, very excited to kick off2025 with my friend, Jim Huffman.
He is the CEO and founder of GrowthHitand one of the smartest marketers I know.
Jim, thank you so much for joining us.
Matt, pumped to be here, man.
(00:48):
That's a great first weekof the year to be here.
I've known you for a while.
You did a workshop on digital marketingand helping to drive demand and pipeline
in Seattle in front of the EntrepreneurNetwork we're both a part of that, I
think had one of the highest ratingsof any workshop in recent memory, which
is a very high bar to set, but I thinkalso as indicative, not only of your
(01:09):
expertise, but also the importance and
and just how popular andon demand that content is.
It seems like we've been talking aboutdigital marketing for a long time.
The playbook continues to change, right?
And so I'm curious, maybe for those thatdon't know who you are, talk a little
bit about your background and then we canget into sort of the changing landscape
of what the digital channels look like.
(01:31):
Yeah, for sure.
And yeah, your talk was pretty awesome.
Adam Weiler and I werecomparing notes on it.
It's fun to have somelight bulb moments go off.
I've GrowthHit, marketing agency.
I started my career in financelooking at spreadsheets and then
that didn't take me too far.
So I got into marketing and westarted this agency about eight
years ago, just accidental.
(01:52):
And I was obsessed with a couple things.
One is, This idea of growth hacking atthe time and growth marketing, which is
essentially just full funnel marketing.
And the second thing wasconversion rate optimization,
which I actually hate the phrase.
It's just doing experiments,doing A B testing.
And so when you're doing A B testing,when you're looking at full funnel
(02:12):
marketing, you're able to have abigger impact on the business on a
sales pipeline, on driving revenue.
And so that's been an obsession overthe years for seeing like how you can
come into a company and add those twomindsets to try and help them one,
unblock growth because people wantto grow, but it's are you even ready?
And then second, something you talkabout is how do you get to this
(02:35):
Holy Grail of predictable revenue orpredictable sales as opposed to you're
like, Holy smokes, something worked.
What happened?
Let me look at the Google analyticsand how do I replicate that?
So that's something I've been really into.
This concept of both growth hackingand CRO has been around for a
while and I think in B2B, it'sa mixed bag historically, right?
(02:57):
We know that a lot ofour buyers are online.
We know that there arejourneys we can manage there.
But oftentimes it's complicated.
It's a long sales cycle.
There's multiple peoplein the buying committee.
So it's not like a clickconversion from search is going
to close the seven figure deal.
So how do you help clients put in context?
The importance of continuing toleverage digital and conversion
(03:21):
rate optimization and continuingto improve performance there with
the complexity of that B2B journey?
Yeah, that's a good question.
So the first thing I do is I have peopleask themselves a question: Do you know
what's actually stopping you from growing?
And it's like a scalabilityassessment if we want to give
it a fancy marketing headline.
And I usually say it'sone of three things.
(03:41):
So if you're thinking of like your Q1goals, why might you not be getting there?
Is it 1).
Positioning?
Are you in a sea of samenessand you're not standing out?
So before you start doing ads, beforeyou start optimizing the funnel,
it's let's get that dialed in.
And so there's a whole pathwe could go down there.
The second is I like to startbottom of the funnel is conversion.
(04:01):
Do you know how to activate people?
Is your sales funnel about booking a call?
Is it a demo?
Is it product led growth?
Do we need to drip them contentauthority before we go for the jugular
or is it about speed and being ableto take a call today because it's a
cybersecurity breach and it's go time?
Or the third thing is maybeyou have a traffic problem.
(04:23):
And when I say traffic problem, doyou have a lever you can pull to
double traffic and double sales?
Or are you a one trick ponyand you can only get it one
way and we can't diversify?
And so that's like the firstthing I'm doing is okay.
Where is their high impactof those three things?
And then from there I'm starting toassess okay, where can we have an impact?
(04:46):
And I'll pause there cause there'sdifferent ways we could go.
But the first thing is likeassessing where are we at?
Like where do we need to haveour lasers focus right now?
Focus is the key to that, right?
I see a lot of companies that arespending a lot of money on digital
marketing, and they're really justfocused on volume and there isn't enough
precision around the right people.
(05:07):
And even in a B2B space, I find it'ssometimes a culture change, Jim, to be
able to help people get away from themost clicks for the lowest possible
cost and say, I'm okay with fewerclicks if they're the right clicks.
Yeah.
So how do you help clients balancequantity and quality in a healthier,
predictable, repeatable way?
Oh my gosh.
That's such a good question.
(05:27):
And you said this in one of your talks,you said a stat that has been living
rent free in my head since we spoke,where it was like, 70 percent of the time
someone makes a B2B purchase, they'regoing with the first person they spoke,
to the first person they heard of.
So what does that mean inrelation to your question?
And it's, as we look at 2025 planning, weneed to have a kumbaya as far as here's
(05:50):
our shekels to put towards marketing.
How much is going to directresponse, I can see ROI today,
versus how much is going to stuffwhere we don't know attribution.
And by the way, If we do,it's not going to happen for 6
months, 12 months, 18 months.
And that's a huge culture shift.
So that's one thing is having thatKumbaya and by the way, reminding people.
(06:13):
The second thing that I thinkmarketers and salespeople, it can
be really tough to create a cultureof messing up, failing and testing.
So the other thing I like to do isHey, of our growth calendar that
we're going to do, what are thethings where it's okay to mess up?
It's okay to learn?
And maybe it's 5% of our budgetor time, or maybe it's 25%.
(06:35):
But knowing that we're plantingseeds, because right now we're doing
a lot of stuff with AI that couldbe viewed as tinkering and failing,
but we're planting seeds for that.
So those are two things I liketo try and get on the same page
with the client or with the team.
Cause if you do, you're setting thefoundation to really build a rockstar
(06:55):
growth team that can test and learn.
But if you don't, oh man, you're goingto have some tough conversation in 90
days where it's like, where's the ROI?
Why didn't that campaign work?
And that's a tough environment to work in.
I wrote down culture of messing up.
I actually think that is really importantwhen you move from saying, I want the
most MQLs, the most leads possibleto saying, I want the right leads.
(07:17):
You are retraining the board.
You're returning the leadershipteam on what the marketing
scorecard might look like.
And if you look at your marketing team,you might find someone on the team that
knows how to do the most leads at thelowest possible cost that is focused
on CRO purely to get higher yield.
And now you're asking themto focus on quality as well.
That's a different thing.
Now-- if you don't address the elephant inthe room, which is we don't expect you to
(07:41):
know how to do this right out of the gate.
Even though there are a bunch ofcompanies you can learn from this company,
this industry, this moment in timein our growth curve is unique, right?
Back to the hard thing abouthard things is no one has
done what you're doing before.
So as a leader, how important is it tobalance-- we need to generate results
(08:02):
with providing some grace and patiencearound the process to get there?
I'm a big fan of a blog post turned toa book, Amp It Up by Frank Slootman,
on how you can turn up the temperatureto go faster, but also do it in a
way where it's a safe place to fail.
So what I like to do is the reversedashboard, like an action tracker where
(08:22):
it's Hey guys, it is okay to mess up.
We're going to be tinkering.
We're testing AI and that is fine.
However, where I'm going to hold the feetto the fire is the reverse dashboard.
And for us, an example of that is howmany experiments do we run in a quarter?
Whether that's landing page experiments,email experiments, whatever that is.
And that's where I track.
(08:43):
So for us, we say 12.
I want to do one per week becauseI believe if I have the team that's
testing and learning, the input willresult in the output that we want.
And so that's one way of trying tobe like, okay, I'm giving grace.
I'm making it okay to mess up,but I'm going to be pretty hard
on- we need to have that input.
(09:04):
But candidly, with GrowthHit, our agencyright now, we put a lot into stuff
where it is immediate ROI results.
And I'm even having to like drinkmy own Kool Aid as we invest more in
content marketing and things whereI'm basically like, I don't care to
see any ROI on that in the short term,but it's something that we had to get
buy in and it starts with the top.
(09:26):
Talking today on Sales PipelineRadio with Jim Huffman.
He is the founder, CEO of GrowthHittalking about conversion rate
optimization, talking about improvingdigital performance, but doing it in a way
that drives the right traffic, the rightpipeline and repeatable, sustainable way.
You mentioned earlier the stat and I'mgoing to get the numbers slightly wrong.
I'm going to ballpark it.
Shout out, Kerry Cunningham, whodid this research in the early Fall.
(09:48):
But your buyers don't want to talkto you until well into the buying
process, like 70, 73 percent ofthe buying process is done when
they're willing to talk to sellers.
They don't want to talk to youbefore then, but like you said,
Jim, they will work with thefirst company they hear from,
they're more likely to buy fromthe first company they know.
Those are counter to each other.
They don't want a demo early on.
(10:09):
They don't want a sales call early on,but they will learn from you early on.
You're the ability for you toeducate, to teach, to challenge the
status quo, to be a trusted advisoris enormous, but here's the rub.
If we're following that data andbelieve that data, those early
engagements are not going toimmediately convert into pipeline.
(10:30):
They're not going to immediatelyconvert into form fills.
They're not going to immediatelyconvert even into leads.
And so now I have a problemjustifying this behavior inside
an organization that is measuringme based on leads and pipeline.
How do we balance that?
How do we try to have a betterconversation internally that
respects the buying journey, butalso respects the work that has to go
(10:54):
into the eventual pipeline building?
It's so much around expectation managementwith the voices in the room, right?
Because if they just think you havethis big green growth button that you
smash, and then you're drowning inleads, that's super dangerous, right?
And so it's getting alignment there.
And one thing that I like todo with these experiments is,
(11:16):
what persona are we going after?
Because we were so good at goingafter bottom of the funnel searches.
I need a CRO agency today.
We crushed that, but guess what?
That's quite easy.
And so it's okay, this is X amount ofresources are going to that, but we're
down with looking at a more top of funnelmetrics, page views, email signups,
and knowing that will pay dividends.
(11:36):
But two kind of tips to thinkthrough there is what's your
seasonality of your business?
When is it demand capture timeversus demand creation time?
So what that means is we see alot of demand going into Q4, so
it's not about doing a white paperto talk about growth strategy.
It is time to close, but thenthere's other seasons where it's
(11:57):
a little bit slower, where Iabsolutely want to lean into that.
But you also want to be oversharingthese insights and data with your board,
with your team to get their buy in.
So they really see the big picture.
Cause if all of a sudden it's Februaryand leads drop and they don't understand
that, those are some awkward andhard conversations to talk about as
(12:18):
you're looking in the rearview mirror.
Expectation managementshowing the big picture.
We call it The 12 Month GrowthCalendar so people really understand
that the recipe you're putting forth.
Increasingly, thankfully, we'reseeing companies that have been
the early adopters of this effortand are seeing the manifestation of
the metrics we talked about, right?
Where they have greater advantage.
(12:39):
If someone's going to buy somethingand there's three vendors, you
don't have a 33 percent chance.
You have a 65 percent chanceof getting the business because
you were there up front.
And so that investment earlierincreases conversion rates and that's
how they then justify that early work.
There's math there that CFOs increasinglyare saying, yeah, I buy into that.
I want to see more of that.
But, that takes a leap of faith andcourage and discipline to lean into.
(13:04):
We're 14 minutes intothis conversation, Jim.
We haven't talked about AI at all.
And I think, obviously search is one ofmultiple components of a demand strategy
and leveraging the digital landscape.
What are you seeing now?
And what do you expect overthe next 12 ish months?
I realized how fast things are going andhow hard that is to predict, but as so
many marketers are trying to figure outhow to manage their digital marketing
(13:27):
in 2025, what's your perspective?
Yeah, it's so fun.
There was a talk, I went to-- the book,AI First-- Andy Sack was a part of it and
talks about being this AI-first companyand what is the foundation of that?
What's your tech stack?
What are your guardrails building anAI council to start playing with it?
So we've started doing that and here'ssome of the things we're seeing.
(13:49):
It's we're basically lookingon a client by client basis and
understanding from a scale perspective,where's the biggest impact, right?
Obviously it's great with copywriting--from ads to landing pages to email.
That's quite simple, right?
The other thing, some clients withimagery using Midjourney, it's been
really interesting to accelerate thework there and with some of the video
(14:10):
work that's still been a little spotty.
But honestly, where I'm gettingreally intrigued is starting to
build databases and get, reallysmart with how we can approach those.
So for example we are looking atlocation based services where we
create a scraper through Google Maps,where we can scrape all the locations.
We can then use a screen grabtool where we pull every webpage.
(14:33):
Then we bring in AI to basicallydo an assessment of those pages.
We're then funneling in Googlereviews to then do a AI based voice
of customer search component of that.
The next question is,what do we do with that?
I don't know.
We're trying to figure that out.
But it's like we're tinkering and we'replaying with looking at what we're doing
and how AI can make us like 10 X better.
(14:54):
And the last thing that I'll sayon this is for me, I found it be
a really good thought partner.
Whenever I can be in aconversation, we use read AI.
to take notes from it.
We import all of our notes tolike a custom GPT, but then
I'll basically take the role ofthis amazing growth hacker that
understands product led growth or ABM.
(15:15):
And before you come with the strategy, askme five questions to give you more context
before you give the recommendations.
I think Jeff Wolf's book AIDriven Leader inspired that.
So those are things thathave been really helpful.
But again, I'm dancing aroundthis question a little bit.
I would say we're still in tinkering mode.
We're building custom GPTs forclients and it's interesting, but
(15:39):
I'm not sitting here Nailed it.
Here we go.
I sense a frustration amongst somemarketers and go to market leaders that
say we've been tinkering for a while.
Why don't we havesomething that's scalable?
I'm like this is all moving really fast.
The rules change on a regular basis.
Some people have figured some thingsout and quite frankly, aren't willing
to share it because it becomes theirlike special sauce to do things that
(16:00):
no one else knows how to do and theydon't want their competitors doing it.
But as frustrating as it is, I think.
It is still tinker time, right?
And I think that, even as you identifythings that can be done relative to
the copy world, the editing world, dataanalysis, or even product marketing
analysis, every new release unlockssomething new that can be done.
And there's going to be tinkeringhappening for quite a long time.
(16:22):
Totally.
And sometimes I worry we have asolution looking for a problem.
And I've been guilty of that.
And I'm trying to thinkof the end goal of Okay.
What's the problem I want to solve andhow can this do it faster or better?
Cause like we would do thesedemos Oh, look at this cool thing.
It can do.
Okay, awesome.
But what are we doing with it again?
What's the application?
So that's something we'retrying to stay honest on.
(16:43):
Yeah.
I know some folks that spend alot of time doing that tinkering
and saying, here's what I can do.
Here's what we can do.
And they will admit I don't alwayshave the application, but what I
want to do is surface the capability.
And the more people do that, themore we watch and listen to them.
Some of us are going to be ableto say, Oh, that solves a problem
over here that is the last puzzlepiece to be able to do X, Y, Z.
(17:04):
So I think It's mud season, right?
We're all tinkering and it's notperfect, but we need that innovation.
We need people that are tinkeringwithout outcomes, right?
I think that the problem withouta solution is a good thing,
because if we talk to each otherabout it, we're going to figure
a lot of things out more quickly.
Jim, for people that like whatthey're hearing and want to
learn more from you, about you.
(17:25):
Where should they go?
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, Jim Huffman.
Website is, just GrowthHit.Com.
And I'm jim@growthhit.Com.
I respond to email way too fast.
It's unhealthy.
So I'm around.
Email Jim.
He'll get back to you within 15seconds is what I heard 24/7, any
time of the day, Jim you're the best.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
(17:45):
Awesome.
Thanks, Matt.
Great to see you, man.
Thanks everyone forlistening and watching today.
Happy New year again.
We got a great lineup of topics andspeakers and featured guests over the
next couple of weeks, so stick with us.
We'll see you next week, next Thursday onanother episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
Until then, take care.
We'll see you then.
All right.
Welcome everybody.
Happy new year and welcometo the very first episode for
2025 of Sales Pipeline Radio.
I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
Excited to have you here for anotheryear of great content, great guests.
Super excited to get this ball rolling.
If you are joining us live onthe middle of your workday, in
the middle of your work weekthank you so much for joining us.
If you are listening or watchingon demand, thank you so much for
(00:27):
downloading and subscribing everyepisode of Sales Pipeline Radio is
always available past, present, andfuture at salespipelineradio.com.
Today, very excited to kick off2025 with my friend, Jim Huffman.
He is the CEO and founder of GrowthHitand one of the smartest marketers I know.
Jim, thank you so much for joining us.
Matt, pumped to be here, man.
(00:48):
That's a great first weekof the year to be here.
I've known you for a while.
You did a workshop on digital marketingand helping to drive demand and pipeline
in Seattle in front of the EntrepreneurNetwork we're both a part of that, I
think had one of the highest ratingsof any workshop in recent memory, which
is a very high bar to set, but I thinkalso as indicative, not only of your
(01:09):
expertise, but also the importance and
and just how popular andon demand that content is.
It seems like we've been talking aboutdigital marketing for a long time.
The playbook continues to change, right?
And so I'm curious, maybe for those thatdon't know who you are, talk a little
bit about your background and then we canget into sort of the changing landscape
of what the digital channels look like.
(01:31):
Yeah, for sure.
And yeah, your talk was pretty awesome.
Adam Weiler and I werecomparing notes on it.
It's fun to have somelight bulb moments go off.
I've GrowthHit, marketing agency.
I started my career in financelooking at spreadsheets and then
that didn't take me too far.
So I got into marketing and westarted this agency about eight
years ago, just accidental.
(01:52):
And I was obsessed with a couple things.
One is, This idea of growth hacking atthe time and growth marketing, which is
essentially just full funnel marketing.
And the second thing wasconversion rate optimization,
which I actually hate the phrase.
It's just doing experiments,doing A B testing.
And so when you're doing A B testing,when you're looking at full funnel
(02:12):
marketing, you're able to have abigger impact on the business on a
sales pipeline, on driving revenue.
And so that's been an obsession overthe years for seeing like how you can
come into a company and add those twomindsets to try and help them one,
unblock growth because people wantto grow, but it's are you even ready?
And then second, something you talkabout is how do you get to this
(02:35):
Holy Grail of predictable revenue orpredictable sales as opposed to you're
like, Holy smokes, something worked.
What happened?
Let me look at the Google analyticsand how do I replicate that?
So that's something I've been really into.
This concept of both growth hackingand CRO has been around for a
while and I think in B2B, it'sa mixed bag historically, right?
(02:57):
We know that a lot ofour buyers are online.
We know that there arejourneys we can manage there.
But oftentimes it's complicated.
It's a long sales cycle.
There's multiple peoplein the buying committee.
So it's not like a clickconversion from search is going
to close the seven figure deal.
So how do you help clients put in context?
The importance of continuing toleverage digital and conversion
(03:21):
rate optimization and continuingto improve performance there with
the complexity of that B2B journey?
Yeah, that's a good question.
So the first thing I do is I have peopleask themselves a question: Do you know
what's actually stopping you from growing?
And it's like a scalabilityassessment if we want to give
it a fancy marketing headline.
And I usually say it'sone of three things.
(03:41):
So if you're thinking of like your Q1goals, why might you not be getting there?
Is it 1).
Positioning?
Are you in a sea of samenessand you're not standing out?
So before you start doing ads, beforeyou start optimizing the funnel,
it's let's get that dialed in.
And so there's a whole pathwe could go down there.
The second is I like to startbottom of the funnel is conversion.
(04:01):
Do you know how to activate people?
Is your sales funnel about booking a call?
Is it a demo?
Is it product led growth?
Do we need to drip them contentauthority before we go for the jugular
or is it about speed and being ableto take a call today because it's a
cybersecurity breach and it's go time?
Or the third thing is maybeyou have a traffic problem.
(04:23):
And when I say traffic problem, doyou have a lever you can pull to
double traffic and double sales?
Or are you a one trick ponyand you can only get it one
way and we can't diversify?
And so that's like the firstthing I'm doing is okay.
Where is their high impactof those three things?
And then from there I'm starting toassess okay, where can we have an impact?
(04:46):
And I'll pause there cause there'sdifferent ways we could go.
But the first thing is likeassessing where are we at?
Like where do we need to haveour lasers focus right now?
Focus is the key to that, right?
I see a lot of companies that arespending a lot of money on digital
marketing, and they're really justfocused on volume and there isn't enough
precision around the right people.
(05:07):
And even in a B2B space, I find it'ssometimes a culture change, Jim, to be
able to help people get away from themost clicks for the lowest possible
cost and say, I'm okay with fewerclicks if they're the right clicks.
Yeah.
So how do you help clients balancequantity and quality in a healthier,
predictable, repeatable way?
Oh my gosh.
That's such a good question.
(05:27):
And you said this in one of your talks,you said a stat that has been living
rent free in my head since we spoke,where it was like, 70 percent of the time
someone makes a B2B purchase, they'regoing with the first person they spoke,
to the first person they heard of.
So what does that mean inrelation to your question?
And it's, as we look at 2025 planning, weneed to have a kumbaya as far as here's
(05:50):
our shekels to put towards marketing.
How much is going to directresponse, I can see ROI today,
versus how much is going to stuffwhere we don't know attribution.
And by the way, If we do,it's not going to happen for 6
months, 12 months, 18 months.
And that's a huge culture shift.
So that's one thing is having thatKumbaya and by the way, reminding people.
(06:13):
The second thing that I thinkmarketers and salespeople, it can
be really tough to create a cultureof messing up, failing and testing.
So the other thing I like to do isHey, of our growth calendar that
we're going to do, what are thethings where it's okay to mess up?
It's okay to learn?
And maybe it's 5% of our budgetor time, or maybe it's 25%.
(06:35):
But knowing that we're plantingseeds, because right now we're doing
a lot of stuff with AI that couldbe viewed as tinkering and failing,
but we're planting seeds for that.
So those are two things I liketo try and get on the same page
with the client or with the team.
Cause if you do, you're setting thefoundation to really build a rockstar
(06:55):
growth team that can test and learn.
But if you don't, oh man, you're goingto have some tough conversation in 90
days where it's like, where's the ROI?
Why didn't that campaign work?
And that's a tough environment to work in.
I wrote down culture of messing up.
I actually think that is really importantwhen you move from saying, I want the
most MQLs, the most leads possibleto saying, I want the right leads.
(07:17):
You are retraining the board.
You're returning the leadershipteam on what the marketing
scorecard might look like.
And if you look at your marketing team,you might find someone on the team that
knows how to do the most leads at thelowest possible cost that is focused
on CRO purely to get higher yield.
And now you're asking themto focus on quality as well.
That's a different thing.
Now-- if you don't address the elephant inthe room, which is we don't expect you to
(07:41):
know how to do this right out of the gate.
Even though there are a bunch ofcompanies you can learn from this company,
this industry, this moment in timein our growth curve is unique, right?
Back to the hard thing abouthard things is no one has
done what you're doing before.
So as a leader, how important is it tobalance-- we need to generate results
(08:02):
with providing some grace and patiencearound the process to get there?
I'm a big fan of a blog post turned toa book, Amp It Up by Frank Slootman,
on how you can turn up the temperatureto go faster, but also do it in a
way where it's a safe place to fail.
So what I like to do is the reversedashboard, like an action tracker where
(08:22):
it's Hey guys, it is okay to mess up.
We're going to be tinkering.
We're testing AI and that is fine.
However, where I'm going to hold the feetto the fire is the reverse dashboard.
And for us, an example of that is howmany experiments do we run in a quarter?
Whether that's landing page experiments,email experiments, whatever that is.
And that's where I track.
(08:43):
So for us, we say 12.
I want to do one per week becauseI believe if I have the team that's
testing and learning, the input willresult in the output that we want.
And so that's one way of trying tobe like, okay, I'm giving grace.
I'm making it okay to mess up,but I'm going to be pretty hard
on- we need to have that input.
(09:04):
But candidly, with GrowthHit, our agencyright now, we put a lot into stuff
where it is immediate ROI results.
And I'm even having to like drinkmy own Kool Aid as we invest more in
content marketing and things whereI'm basically like, I don't care to
see any ROI on that in the short term,but it's something that we had to get
buy in and it starts with the top.
(09:26):
Talking today on Sales PipelineRadio with Jim Huffman.
He is the founder, CEO of GrowthHittalking about conversion rate
optimization, talking about improvingdigital performance, but doing it in a way
that drives the right traffic, the rightpipeline and repeatable, sustainable way.
You mentioned earlier the stat and I'mgoing to get the numbers slightly wrong.
I'm going to ballpark it.
Shout out, Kerry Cunningham, whodid this research in the early Fall.
(09:48):
But your buyers don't want to talkto you until well into the buying
process, like 70, 73 percent ofthe buying process is done when
they're willing to talk to sellers.
They don't want to talk to youbefore then, but like you said,
Jim, they will work with thefirst company they hear from,
they're more likely to buy fromthe first company they know.
Those are counter to each other.
They don't want a demo early on.
(10:09):
They don't want a sales call early on,but they will learn from you early on.
You're the ability for you toeducate, to teach, to challenge the
status quo, to be a trusted advisoris enormous, but here's the rub.
If we're following that data andbelieve that data, those early
engagements are not going toimmediately convert into pipeline.
(10:30):
They're not going to immediatelyconvert into form fills.
They're not going to immediatelyconvert even into leads.
And so now I have a problemjustifying this behavior inside
an organization that is measuringme based on leads and pipeline.
How do we balance that?
How do we try to have a betterconversation internally that
respects the buying journey, butalso respects the work that has to go
(10:54):
into the eventual pipeline building?
It's so much around expectation managementwith the voices in the room, right?
Because if they just think you havethis big green growth button that you
smash, and then you're drowning inleads, that's super dangerous, right?
And so it's getting alignment there.
And one thing that I like todo with these experiments is,
(11:16):
what persona are we going after?
Because we were so good at goingafter bottom of the funnel searches.
I need a CRO agency today.
We crushed that, but guess what?
That's quite easy.
And so it's okay, this is X amount ofresources are going to that, but we're
down with looking at a more top of funnelmetrics, page views, email signups,
and knowing that will pay dividends.
(11:36):
But two kind of tips to thinkthrough there is what's your
seasonality of your business?
When is it demand capture timeversus demand creation time?
So what that means is we see alot of demand going into Q4, so
it's not about doing a white paperto talk about growth strategy.
It is time to close, but thenthere's other seasons where it's
(11:57):
a little bit slower, where Iabsolutely want to lean into that.
But you also want to be oversharingthese insights and data with your board,
with your team to get their buy in.
So they really see the big picture.
Cause if all of a sudden it's Februaryand leads drop and they don't understand
that, those are some awkward andhard conversations to talk about as
(12:18):
you're looking in the rearview mirror.
Expectation managementshowing the big picture.
We call it The 12 Month GrowthCalendar so people really understand
that the recipe you're putting forth.
Increasingly, thankfully, we'reseeing companies that have been
the early adopters of this effortand are seeing the manifestation of
the metrics we talked about, right?
Where they have greater advantage.
(12:39):
If someone's going to buy somethingand there's three vendors, you
don't have a 33 percent chance.
You have a 65 percent chanceof getting the business because
you were there up front.
And so that investment earlierincreases conversion rates and that's
how they then justify that early work.
There's math there that CFOs increasinglyare saying, yeah, I buy into that.
I want to see more of that.
But, that takes a leap of faith andcourage and discipline to lean into.
(13:04):
We're 14 minutes intothis conversation, Jim.
We haven't talked about AI at all.
And I think, obviously search is one ofmultiple components of a demand strategy
and leveraging the digital landscape.
What are you seeing now?
And what do you expect overthe next 12 ish months?
I realized how fast things are going andhow hard that is to predict, but as so
many marketers are trying to figure outhow to manage their digital marketing
(13:27):
in 2025, what's your perspective?
Yeah, it's so fun.
There was a talk, I went to-- the book,AI First-- Andy Sack was a part of it and
talks about being this AI-first companyand what is the foundation of that?
What's your tech stack?
What are your guardrails building anAI council to start playing with it?
So we've started doing that and here'ssome of the things we're seeing.
(13:49):
It's we're basically lookingon a client by client basis and
understanding from a scale perspective,where's the biggest impact, right?
Obviously it's great with copywriting--from ads to landing pages to email.
That's quite simple, right?
The other thing, some clients withimagery using Midjourney, it's been
really interesting to accelerate thework there and with some of the video
(14:10):
work that's still been a little spotty.
But honestly, where I'm gettingreally intrigued is starting to
build databases and get, reallysmart with how we can approach those.
So for example we are looking atlocation based services where we
create a scraper through Google Maps,where we can scrape all the locations.
We can then use a screen grabtool where we pull every webpage.
(14:33):
Then we bring in AI to basicallydo an assessment of those pages.
We're then funneling in Googlereviews to then do a AI based voice
of customer search component of that.
The next question is,what do we do with that?
I don't know.
We're trying to figure that out.
But it's like we're tinkering and we'replaying with looking at what we're doing
and how AI can make us like 10 X better.
(14:54):
And the last thing that I'll sayon this is for me, I found it be
a really good thought partner.
Whenever I can be in aconversation, we use read AI.
to take notes from it.
We import all of our notes tolike a custom GPT, but then
I'll basically take the role ofthis amazing growth hacker that
understands product led growth or ABM.
(15:15):
And before you come with the strategy, askme five questions to give you more context
before you give the recommendations.
I think Jeff Wolf's book AIDriven Leader inspired that.
So those are things thathave been really helpful.
But again, I'm dancing aroundthis question a little bit.
I would say we're still in tinkering mode.
We're building custom GPTs forclients and it's interesting, but
(15:39):
I'm not sitting here Nailed it.
Here we go.
I sense a frustration amongst somemarketers and go to market leaders that
say we've been tinkering for a while.
Why don't we havesomething that's scalable?
I'm like this is all moving really fast.
The rules change on a regular basis.
Some people have figured some thingsout and quite frankly, aren't willing
to share it because it becomes theirlike special sauce to do things that
(16:00):
no one else knows how to do and theydon't want their competitors doing it.
But as frustrating as it is, I think.
It is still tinker time, right?
And I think that, even as you identifythings that can be done relative to
the copy world, the editing world, dataanalysis, or even product marketing
analysis, every new release unlockssomething new that can be done.
And there's going to be tinkeringhappening for quite a long time.
(16:22):
Totally.
And sometimes I worry we have asolution looking for a problem.
And I've been guilty of that.
And I'm trying to thinkof the end goal of Okay.
What's the problem I want to solve andhow can this do it faster or better?
Cause like we would do thesedemos Oh, look at this cool thing.
It can do.
Okay, awesome.
But what are we doing with it again?
What's the application?
So that's something we'retrying to stay honest on.
(16:43):
Yeah.
I know some folks that spend alot of time doing that tinkering
and saying, here's what I can do.
Here's what we can do.
And they will admit I don't alwayshave the application, but what I
want to do is surface the capability.
And the more people do that, themore we watch and listen to them.
Some of us are going to be ableto say, Oh, that solves a problem
over here that is the last puzzlepiece to be able to do X, Y, Z.
(17:04):
So I think It's mud season, right?
We're all tinkering and it's notperfect, but we need that innovation.
We need people that are tinkeringwithout outcomes, right?
I think that the problem withouta solution is a good thing,
because if we talk to each otherabout it, we're going to figure
a lot of things out more quickly.
Jim, for people that like whatthey're hearing and want to
learn more from you, about you.
(17:25):
Where should they go?
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, Jim Huffman.
Website is, just GrowthHit.Com.
And I'm jim@growthhit.Com.
I respond to email way too fast.
It's unhealthy.
So I'm around.
Email Jim.
He'll get back to you within 15seconds is what I heard 24/7, any
time of the day, Jim you're the best.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
(17:45):
Awesome.
Thanks, Matt.
Great to see you, man.
Thanks everyone forlistening and watching today.
Happy New year again.
We got a great lineup of topics andspeakers and featured guests over the
next couple of weeks, so stick with us.
We'll see you next week, next Thursday onanother episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
Until then, take care.
We'll see you then.
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