← MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth
Intent Data Is Dead. Alpha Signals Aren’t.
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Benjamin Shapiro
The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
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From advertising to software as a service
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Nick Zeckic
to data across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55 to 65% open rate. Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs
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Benjamin Shapiro
better than TV advertising. Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
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Nick Zeckic
We're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action. Then it's just a matter of timing.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world class marketers that you technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech podcast. Benjamin Shapiro
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25% Only 25% of B2B companies use intent data. According to Landbase, 96% of businesses that implement intent data reported increased sales and roi. The gap represents billions in missed pipeline. Our problem isn't the lack of data. Buying signals are hiding in plain sight. While some marketers still obsess over vanity metrics like email open rates, MQL counts, what are we living in 1996? If you're operating with pre AI frameworks, you're confusing revenue generation with engagement theater. So how do you move beyond legacy vanity metrics to capture real time buying signals? I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Nick Zeckic, the chief firestarter at Smoke Signals AI, the an AI first HubSpot agency that helps B2B companies generate, capture and activate buying signals to measure pipeline, not vanity metrics. And today Nick is going to share his process for redesigning demand generation from the ground up for the age of AI. Time for a short break to hear
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Nick Zeckic
Thank you very much for having me.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Excited to have you here. What a privilege. Every once in a while you see someone from across the room, your eyes meet and you just know that they're your person. And when we were introduced by Mark Serkin, a mutual friend of ours, I felt that way about you. I hope the feeling was mutual. And I can't wait to hear a little bit about your demand generation process. Walk me through moving beyond MQL SQL frameworks to real time activation. What's the world look like today?
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Nick Zeckic
Yeah, it's wild. I think it looks more honest than it has in a really long time. Right. I think we've been, you know, chasing these vanity metrics and I think a little bit of that discussion is, is really interesting in as much as I think it craps on marketing. But I think the problem is that it was all marketing had because it didn't exist really as a function. And then it finally started getting a seat at the table and then when it got a seat at the table, it was asked to prove its value and Worth and MQLs and SQLs were all we had. Right. And so we built systems around those types of behaviors. But what's really interesting is that if you kind of look pre marketing as it exists today with marketing automation platforms and everything else, if you scaled, you hired a ton of salespeople and a ton of market and a ton of SDRs and BDRs and roles like that, right? Humans who would pick up phones and write emails, and the more of those humans you had, the more of those phone calls and emails that you could kind of create and send. And with AI, I think what's happening is that we're finally in a place and I would say, you know, kind of advanced orchestration goes into that bucket too. But we're finally in a place where the one to one work that frontline sellers have been great at for a long time when they are good at their jobs, mind you. So this is not all of them. This is those who are really good is now something that we can kind of extract and extrapolate up to the top of the funnel and our activities that are there. So I just think we're living in a completely new world. That's really exciting.
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Benjamin Shapiro
I want to bag on the old way that we used to do it for a second because, you know, how do we count whether marketing is successful in B2B? It's an MQL we're talking 10 years ago now. You know, sales SQLs and how are we able to convert them? The QL part is right, it's, it's a, a judgment based on the marketing team's decision on whether this is good or this is bad. If I want more of them, I just loosen my judgment criteria. If I want them to have a higher conversion rate, I, I restrict my judgment criteria. Same thing with sales qualified leads, right? So it's like the volume of people that we're counting are how many we want to count. And to me that process was always broken. Now we're in, you know, a signal age or era when we talk about what makes a difference to marketers. So how are you distinguishing between signals that are actually going to drive, drive revenue, which is what we should all be shooting for and just vanity metrics that look good.
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Nick Zeckic
Yeah, my God. I mean, that's the question, right? When we start working with customers, we have kind of an Occam's razor question. And it's. And we talk to sales first, right? It's okay, your sellers, who's your best seller? Who are your best, you know, two, three, four sellers. And in a conversation with them, the question that we love to ask is what is it that you hear in a discovery call that your gut instantly tells you, holy crap, I'm going to get this deal, right? I haven't even started pitching yet. I haven't started asking any of my discovery questions, you know, or maybe I'm just getting into discovery. But this customer, this prospect said something to me and whatever it was that they said, I want to know what that thing is where you light up and you come out of that meeting going, yeah, I've got this one in the bag. Because it turns out that somebody visiting your website, downloading some ebook, right? Showing up to a webinar probably doesn't actually mean anything. It probably communicates awareness, brand familiarity. If you word it, email them, or reach out, you have a higher likelihood that they might open something if they stuck around for the whole webinar or came to your field event or saw you in a booth at an event. Right. Those are reasons that you want to kind of invest in trust. Right. But if you want to know that someone's ready to buy, it can't be some generalized off the shelf. Yeah. You know, they're hiring some people or they're doing X or they're doing Y. It has to be something truly unique. And, and we now live in a time where the data that you can get on organizations oftentimes just by being really thoughtful about how to use scrapers. Right. We're not even talking about buying data assets, many of which are out there in the market and charging an arm and a leg for, for access to data that's frankly free. Right. It's, it's. How do you figure out where the information lives and then what do you do about it? Right. And, and the what do you do is the other piece of the puzzle that I think has been missing for a long time with data.
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Benjamin Shapiro
So I think of what you're talking about as the difference between segmentation. Right. How do I define who is in my sandbox? Where am I going to play? I only want businesses with more than $10 million of revenue because they can pay for my service or somebody that is hiring for this type of role because they're already self selecting, they've identified this pain. And the flip side of that sort of filtering and segmentation is what are their buying signals? Like, yes, somebody is in my icp, but when they get in front of sales and they're like, I can't stand this problem, and they bang their hands on the table, you're like, oh my God, they're buying from me. Like, what gets the salesman's heart rate going up? What is the buying signals? How do you identify those? Like, how do you quantify or qualify? Like they want me.
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Nick Zeckic
Yeah. Right. Yeah, It's a really good question. So you make a good distinction. I think a lot of go to market has started with ideal customer profile, icp. Right. And, and created audiences and then gone after them. Right. It's wildly inefficient. It's better than throwing spaghetti against the wall and telling your message to anybody and everybody, many of whom who would never buy what you have. But the vast majority of even your ideal customer profile just isn't in a place to do it. Right. They may not be problem aware. They may not be in the shit, right? Experiencing the pain.
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Benjamin Shapiro
They don't know you.
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Nick Zeckic
That's a hundred percent right. Which by the way always kind of brings me back to again, and we talked about it for a second because before the idea of trust, right, like one, they have to fit the ICP and, and almost no one I've ever spoken to has an ICP that's tight enough. I, I think they're all about two or three degrees away from the degree of tightness that you really want to be. Second is you have to have brokered some degree of trust if somebody's really in the. And they don't know who you are. I'm not saying don't reach out, but I think trust is, and I think a lot of marketing teams kind of use the word brand. But it's been difficult to quantify and we're starting to get into a place where we can actually quantify those things, right? We can know who's engaged with our LinkedIn posts. We can have a really interesting idea of who we've activated for field marketing. We can start to build all those things up. And I don't think that it works the way that lead scoring methodologies work, right? I don't think it works in the way that attribution models work. Attribution models suggest them going to this event has this much influence on them having bought the thing. It's not that it doesn't have influence, it's just, it's not actually influencing the purchase, it's influencing trust, influencing the purchase. The fact that I was in really deep crap and yes, I made the decision to go with you guys because I know and I like you, right? But they're kind of like there, these are different planes of consideration. So I have a whole set of gripes about whether or not the attribution market writ large is worth anybody's time at all. I'm sure people will fight me in the comments. You know, I think when we think about signal, I'll give you an example. So we had a customer that was in the automated, you know, software QA space, right? So end to end quality assurance testing for software, lots of things about that that are really, really hard, really great product. And we actually looked at public GitHub repos, which shockingly a lot of companies have, have public repos and look to see what testing methodologies they were using and how long they were running for. Because what we could find is that if the time that that was running was fairly extended. It actually indicated that they probably weren't able to test a lot of their end to end product processes. Right. So by getting that information we could turn around and say, hey, our guess is this might be true for you. The rate at which the response was yes, you're right, was 90% right. Now that's a tough signal to get right and you have to really be super thoughtful about it. But I think what is happening is that if you step back and you think about where your customers spend their time, where they commit and execute their work, how their work is represented, SEC filings could be a place foia, you know, RFP document discussions and town hall councils. I mean this stuff's all on the Internet. Right. And it, but it's not in your average kind of like quote unquote intent or signal data provider. And that's what we really kind of harp on is that the bespoke signal is hypercritical. And most businesses, the good news is they don't have 27 that they should be going after. They have like three or five or whatever. There's not a lot of them. So it's harder. But once you get it, you're kind of there. Right. You've reached the promised land in a lot of ways.
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Benjamin Shapiro
In my notes here, I have a question to ask you about alpha signals. Is that your term? Is that an industry term?
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Nick Zeckic
I've been saying it. I'm sure someone else has said it before. Neither alpha nor signal are unique terms within go to market. But it is a way that we talk about what we.
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Benjamin Shapiro
I'm giving you credit for it. Right. The alpha signal, which is the difference from I went to Sixth Sense and bought some sort of fabricated intent signal. Right. Somebody else is telling me there's intent as opposed to I am building a customer signal, trigger, pain point. Like let's call that an alpha signal. Your example of there's a QA vendor that is looking at how long it takes for you to process whatever it is. Right. That's, that's something that's custom and specific to you. We're in the age of AI.
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Nick Zeckic
Yep.
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Benjamin Shapiro
How do we identify the alpha signals as opposed to rely on like the stale intent signals? How do you find and cultivate and build your own alpha signal?
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Nick Zeckic
Well, I'll be self serving for a second. We actually built a free app that does this. So it's gtmos smokesignals AI totally free, anybody can use it. And it's got some of our proprietary approach to how it is that you figured this stuff out and think about them. But a lot of it is just trying to become as deeply aware of all the data that's in your space as you possibly can. It is shocking how many companies have and organizations have APIs. There is almost nothing on a company's website that you can't programmatically gather with scrapers. And if you know what your ICP is, telling a scraper to go and look for X, Y and Z on all of those companies websites once a week is actually pretty easy to do, right? You got the list of websites because you have the list of accounts and you're asking it to go find a couple of, you know, things and because AI is really good at saying, well, I don't care how this site is organized versus that one. I'm just looking for something generally that is this. It'll find it, right? The degree of resolution is incredibly high and it does that really well. But there's a thought process to it. And like I said, the best thing to kind of do is to talk to the sales organization and say what is the thing that comes up in discovery that lets you know that this is a deal? And then just try to find a data proxy for that insight. And it is very rare that there isn't one. Now that doesn't mean that it's a like for like, right? Sometimes you need several things to be true, right? So let's say for us, for example, we have a couple of ICPs, one of which is an early stage organization. They have a single marketing leader on the team. She's probably fairly senior. They've just raised a round somewhere between four and $10 million. They're north of a million bucks in revenue. So product's got some stability to it and it knows what it's doing in the market. And all of a sudden this leader, she's got this mandate to grow, right? We have to go look at SEC filings for Form D's right. To understand about the funding.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Sorry, what's a Form D?
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Nick Zeckic
A Form D is the official document that you have to file if you raise money as a private company. Okay, Remarkable. But it's in the sec, right? The SEC is a government institution. That's our data. Because we pay taxes, right? So really fascinating. But then we have to marry that with whether or not there's a marketing leader within the organization, right? Because if there's not, we find that that's not a great fit for us. Right. We need an internal partner in order to be successful on behalf of our customers. Right. So we have to have a couple of things that are true, and then we go and kick off an analysis of the company's website. The average deal size has to be large. AI is great at scraping and understanding and extrapolating that information. Right. Which indicates it's a fairly complex sale. These are places where we know that we do well. Right. If they were plg, they don't keep going through the process, it's over. We don't work with that process. We don't have any skill sets. And it's not that I don't think that it works. I think it's just very hard and very expensive and we suck at it, so we just don't touch it. But those are the types of things. It's oftentimes not a single metric. It can be two or three things combined. That kind of help you really understand that you're in the middle of a really good op.
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Benjamin Shapiro
So I'm going through this process of rebuilding my GTM for. I hear everything's the production company I run. And the only thing I can think of is, like, we talked about, what are the signals? We, you know, box the universe. They're marketing a technology companies. We're looking for the marketing leaders. We want them to be 10 to $250 million of revenue. So pre IPO, most likely, you know, have a marketing team big enough to be able to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a podcast a year. And that's great. That sort of gives us the segmentation we've. We have our icp. And I'm struggling between this notion of, well, the world was like, focused on cold outreach and just hit messages to people and send emails, and I get them 10 times a day, I flag them as spam and move on. I don't read any of those messages, so why would I send those? So we're trying to move towards this methodology, not of cold outreach, but to warm outreach. Right. Let me push content to that universe that I'm interested in and see who engages in that content. And when they engage, then now I know that they are aware of me. I know they're in my icp. And then I start doing some research to try to figure out, do they have pain? Right? Do they have a branded podcast? How's that branded podcast performing? And so, like, to me, there's this difference between your filtering mechanism that we talked about before. Are they in your icp? Who are you pushing your content to? And then I'm starting to think about, all right, warm outreach instead of cold to start to drive awareness and sort of filter to see who's most likely going to resonate with my message? The whole second half of this thing is really confusing to me.
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Nick Zeckic
Sure.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Great. So now I know somebody that's got a branded podcast that I looked and I could look at things like how often do they publish? That's public data. How many YouTube views do they get? There's a tool, Rifonic, that's how many podcast listeners do they get? It's a proxy. It's not perfect. And I've got all this information. So what do you do with that? Let's call that my alpha signal. It's their podcast's performance, or what I think is their podcast performance. How do you figure out what is the right message and delivery method to actually get somebody to not just be like, oh, here, here's another cold email, but here's somebody I should actually talk to.
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Nick Zeckic
Yeah, these are great points. And there's a few things. So we like to take an audience like that and figure out everything that they're talking about in public. Right. So what are they saying in their LinkedIn posts? And if you're running a podcast and you're in marketing, you're probably an active LinkedIn user. Right? So what are you talking about there? Have they presented at conferences lately? Et cetera, et cetera, and doing a little bit of a mapping exercise to see whether or not there's a disconnect between the things that they're talking about and maybe some of the podcasts. I think, even absent the podcast. Right. Hey, okay, this company fits those other elements. They have a marketing team, they don't have a podcast. They have a CEO who's really active on LinkedIn, who has a really strong follower base. Oh, my God. There's such an incredible opportunity to exploit the power of a podcast in a scenario like this. Like, I think of, you know, the CEO of Chili Piper, she's incredibly active on LinkedIn. They run field events that are very well regarded, like unbelievable field events. They have no podcast. I think that's insane. I think that's a gap for them. It's like such a great opportunity for Chili Piper to have a podcast. And I think people would listen, right? I think people would listen. They would listen to her. She's amazing. And in a scenario like that, my activation would be ingesting all of her LinkedIn posts and saying, here, I think, are your first 10 episodes, and then using the episode information and then doing a dynamic search against LinkedIn to go find who the guests are to help. Help her have those conversations. And saying, this is the, this is the next 10 episodes. Right? Like, let's go get these 10 people. These people are ICPs. Some of them might already even be your customers. Right. They've been talking about the same stuff that you're talking about. I love this post where you talked about that this would make for a great pot. I've got nine more ideas. Do you want to talk about it? That's a provocative email to the CEO. Right. And I think she either forwards it to her head of marketing or she takes the call herself. My point being is that I think one of the things that we break when we think about Signal is that we start at Signal rather than starting at sales execution. And that's why I say it's like, what's the conversation that's happening with sales? Because if it starts there, the question you're asking becomes a lot easier.
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Benjamin Shapiro
I want to double click on that. We're starting with Signal, not. I think you said sales activation. Explain that to me. Yeah, so
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Nick Zeckic
look, I think Six senses, concept of intent data is a waste of everybody's time. I, I think. And it's not even theirs. Right. It's bomb bores. They. They license Bomb Bora's data. And sorry to the bombor guys, same thing. I, I don't, I don't think it means very much in the universe of Signal. I don't think it means very much. But you know what? They did really well market well there. Yeah. For sure. Their marketing team crushed. They were absolutely phenomenal. But they created sales activation as actually the primary thrust. Right. It was an organizational philosophy for sales organizations. Right. Much like account based marketing is an organizational philosophy for sales and marketing organizations that are saying, I want to go after a set number of accounts. It turns out if you just get people to focus, even if the focus resolution isn't that great at the data level, but you're just telling people to do a better job on fewer things. Outcomes are better. So people literally have been paying $200,000 a year to tools like Six Sense to just basically financially kick them into focus. And if that's all they do, I actually tell you it's worth the money right now, I think that that is the VP of sales and VP of Marketing. I think it's their job in order to pull that stuff off. That's an alignment problem. It's a strategic problem. It's a cultural problem. It's not a tooling problem, by and large. But they started with A sales interface. And so one of the reasons that I think so many of the new signal based tools have an automated email function against them, you know, the quote unquote AISDRs, right. The qualifieds and the AISDR and all these other guys, Webnext, et cetera. The reason that they have the automated email tools is because it is the sales activation kind of automated right? Now it turns out that they're all crapping the bed because a, their signals are vague and they're off the shelf, which means there are too many of them, which means you're sending too many emails, which means you are then getting crapped on in terms of email deliverability. And you start to move that system too hard and it ends up, sure, for a month or two, yielding a new set of 50 or 60 or 80 or even a hundred meetings a month.
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Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, low hanging fruit.
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Nick Zeckic
Exactly. And then it starts to go down the road, right? And it's the same thing as what 6sense was giving you, except at higher volume because there's no gap between the signal and the email outbound. Right.
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Benjamin Shapiro
I guess the struggle that I have in my head is even if I have a rich alpha signal, how do I differentiate the messaging that I'm sending so it doesn't appear to be the same crap? Cold outreach. And you're saying, well, be more targeted and send less volume. But to me it's like if I emailed the. You use the example the CEO of Chili Piper and was like, hey, you should start a podcast. Guess what's happening to that email.
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Nick Zeckic
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Benjamin Shapiro
It's going to spam, right? Like, because I guess the question is like the, the Delivery part is one, the mechanism, it's email and it's LinkedIn. Those are our delivery vehicles. But then there's a messaging component of like, how do I now that I have this rich signal, cut through the clutter. Yeah.
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Nick Zeckic
I think the signal is the message, right? If the resolution is good enough, the signal is the message, right? Saying, oh, I know that you just hired somebody, it's a fact. Okay. And then like, and so what, right? Or hey, you just got funding, you
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Benjamin Shapiro
have money, can I have some of it?
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Nick Zeckic
Right, Exactly. What an insane concept, right? I think there's two things that are really important. One, again, if the resolution on the, on on the signal is so clear, right. To go back. It is. I'm not saying give me a hundred grand a year for a podcast. I'm saying here's your first episode, here's your first guest, and here's why I think that's true. I've got another nine episode and guest ideas. We're talking about value add content. What I'm doing is I'm informing your strategy and if you do it, if you do it really well, you can take that signal data, aggregate it and actually turn it into content.
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Benjamin Shapiro
So play it out with me here. The email to Chili Piper. Hey, I've put together the list of your first 10 podcast guests. Is my email title. Bob Smith should be your first podcast guest, maybe.
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Nick Zeckic
I think that stuff is where, I think that's where classic marketing skill sets still have a ton of value. Now we here, we create psychographic profiles on prospects at the person level, which informs how a subject line gets constructed for an individual or the body copy gets constructed for an individual, but the core message comes out of the signal.
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Benjamin Shapiro
All right, now tell me that in English. Psychographic profiles at the individual level. You're finding out what individual people respond to.
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Nick Zeckic
Yeah, exactly. So when you think about things like age and gender to some degree, but titles, the words that they use when they post on LinkedIn, the way that they've constructed their about me sections, the way that they talk about their jobs and the companies that they work at, the things that they've said, online presentations that they may have given, we use that information to understand who is this human, right? Like how do they like to be spoken to. Now what, we don't know it for a fact. We're, we're, we're projecting off of psychographics. But it turns out that there are psychographic models out there that allow you to get a good idea of, hey, this person likes it short and no bs. This person likes color and you know, forward looking excitement. This person likes something that's incredibly pragmatic, right? You can, you can figure this stuff out. So some people like provocative, you know, one word email subject lines, right? And other people, it's like, you know, the email subject line is Bob or whatever. There was a guy, there's a guy who has a, a company and he had a subject line that was just potato. And it was, I thought it was so funny. I thought it was so funny. And he said it was one of those subject lines. We did it in a mass outbound and he's like, our open rate was awesome. And we surveyed some of the people that didn't open it. We actually did the work. And the people who didn't open it, they're like, I have no idea what that is. I'm not opening an email called Potato, right? The people who did open it were like, potato what? What? Who sent me an email that says potato, right? Like, now I have to open the email. And I loved it so much. I thought it was such a clever approach. But it's a really great example that I thought that was hysterical. The second I saw the email subject line, I thought it was so funny and I opened it. All right, but there are other people for whom that just didn't work. But that's the kind of human I am, right? And so there's some testing there. There's still a lot of cleverness. I think subject lines are still a place where copywriters have a lot of opportunity to add a ton of value. Because I don't think the LLMs have figured it out yet. But the body saying that I have figured out that this is true. God, your audience is massive. Your opportunity is huge. And in fact, it's so obvious to me I've already figured out what the first 10 episodes are, right? It's like, oh, I would. Okay, like, this is interesting, but the content itself is designed around this truth about this woman and her audience and her being public and knowable. And if you were to take her last, say, 10 LinkedIn posts and put them in a cloud and be like, based upon this, give me a psychographic profile and give me a suggestion on an email subject line, it would give you something very, very interesting, right? Very useful. Like you. You don't have to go down a million layers of crazy data and tooling and build a bunch of shit like, that person is worth a lot of money. Take 30 minutes and get ready to send her an email. Right? And this is another thing that I think is also really important about signals that like, how do I then instantly turn this into a scale operation? The answer is you don't. Ideally, there's a lot of like by hand stuff. And when you're in the by hand motion, you'll realize it's like, oh, oh, I wouldn't. I'm glad I didn't create a prompt like I thought I was going to because I missed all this, right? And it's like, now that I'm looking back over it, I realize that I didn't have it right. And I think that's another part of the reason why I think stuff like AISDRs are a nightmare is because there's no opportunity to really get that right. They don't train on your voice and your language, the way that you write and talk. They don't know any of that. Stuff. Right. They in fact know very little. Right. So when you do this stuff by hand, then you can commit it to a orchestration tool into prompts and things like that, and you can scale it up. But. But I think it's an excellent question. The best way to answer it is actually do it by hand. Right. But start with what's all the information that I could scalably gather about my ICP that would make me better informed in how it is that I would reach out and then put it together from there?
- [34:23]
Benjamin Shapiro
I think that's my favorite learning from our conversation. Whereas I'm thinking through segmentation and then signal and then which channel. There's a missing piece there which is analyzing, I think you called it psychographic profiles. But analyzing the person and their writing style. And based on their writing style, you can infer how you should write to them, then send the message. Is an interesting middle step to understand how to make sure that you're getting not only deliverability but resonance with your message. Yeah. The last part of this is that the sort of, you know, you mentioned. All right, it's not automation and more is more. This tends to be more focused. The strategy is less is more. More enrichment of the right people, delivering the right message, understanding their behaviors, their profile, and then being laser targeted. Talk to me about the system here that you're using. I know that you're a HubSpot firm. Why are you using HubSpot as the central architecture for building all of this as opposed to other systems or Martech stacks where you're weaving it all together?
- [35:33]
Nick Zeckic
Yeah. Um, so on the complex can do anything side, Marketo is entirely too complex. Market share is waning. It's not a great place to, you know, build an agency. In my perspective, the Salesforce ecosystem, Pardot is objectively a pile of hot, steaming garbage. It's a terrible marketing automation platform. Now it's.
- [35:57]
Benjamin Shapiro
Give them. Give them some credit. It survived a really long time, dude.
- [36:02]
Nick Zeckic
It really has. And it's incredible to understand their story. I mean, their founder basically bootstrapped that thing to a really nice exit to Salesforce and did really well. And now, I mean, there aren't many major, like complex B2B software packages that didn't actually get an early check from that guy.
- [36:23]
Benjamin Shapiro
So.
- [36:23]
Nick Zeckic
So I have no. I mean, he was early and killed it and was like, well, there's got to be an alternative to Marketo. And he built it. Right. And I have John Miller and the guys from the Marketo team too. They're awesome. Like, they're all, they're all awesome. And they will all tell you that those systems aren't built to support modern marketing.
- [36:39]
Benjamin Shapiro
They're 20 year old systems.
- [36:41]
Nick Zeckic
A hundred percent, 100% HubSpot to their credit. While they're coming up on about 20 years now, they, they do keep building, they commit new stuff really quickly. Right. It's an elegant kind of integrated platform. Whereas like Salesforce Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce CRM, they're all built on different database structures. So moving information back and forth is really a pain in the ass. If you think that marketing's job is to enable sales, you should have a marketing system that has the, that speaks the exact same language as the CRM. The only full featured solution that does that is HubSpot. Like period. That's not an opinion, it's a fact. Right. There's just no other way to have that kind of fluency across the entirety of gtm. Now can you make it work across other systems? For sure. But HubSpot is just so elegant and in singularity to me. Right. And their ecosystem is robust. If there's anything that you need that's missing, it's probably in there somewhere. Building custom apps is an afternoon type thing. Right. I mean it is a fast development platform. Right. So there's a lot of benefits there. But it's. I just trust them to keep getting it right. Right.
- [38:05]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah. I think that as I think through this entire conversation of, you know, segmented segmentation to signal understanding who you're talking to, let's call that profile enrichment and then messaging. It all has to live somewhere. And there is this constant challenge for me and I think other marketers of do I want this unified system that's built all together or am I marteching it together? Am I, you know, using duct tape and glue to pass data from place to place to place? And I think that, you know, it might be to use your email open line, potato, potato, you know, it might be one or the other. Maybe it can be done both ways. I understand the value for, for a unique system and you know, you're building something that is sophisticated and can scale for larger organizations. Makes sense that you want something that's unified, that not only can be built and easily scaled, but also that people feel comfortable operating in.
- [39:06]
Nick Zeckic
I think that's right. I think that's right. And we don't really want to go into an environment where we have to make a core systems argument. Right. That's, you know, we don't sell HubSpot. Right. We don't go into accounts and convince them to leave Tool X for, for HubSpot. Right. It's, that's, that's not our game. There's a quarter of a million HubSpot customers, 25,000 of whom are very large and fit our, our primary icp. Right. So that's a really good place for us to go. It's a massive market. If we are currently serving 25 customers at one time, we're doing great. Right. So our degree of penetration on that market does not need to be huge for us to be very, very happy.
- [39:48]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, I want to go on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a couple of quick hitting questions around signal based marketing and a little bit about your career. Are you ready?
- [39:56]
Nick Zeckic
Sure. Let's hit it.
- [39:57]
Benjamin Shapiro
Here we go. What's the biggest learning that's still apples to apples today from your two Martech exits?
- [40:05]
Nick Zeckic
Ooh, God. Never raise outside capital.
- [40:09]
Benjamin Shapiro
Oh, you're a bootstrapper.
- [40:11]
Nick Zeckic
Oh, yeah.
- [40:12]
Benjamin Shapiro
Okay. Why, why wouldn't you raise outside capital today?
- [40:16]
Nick Zeckic
Because I don't think that you need to. One. The second that you raise any, it changes your brain chemistry as to what it is that you are doing, why you're doing it and how you are doing takes you away from the customer. If you are customer obsessed, you are going to get to cash faster and customer cash is better. The other thing is, what if you get to a million bucks, someone wants to give you to 10 get give you $10 million to take your business. That is an incredible result. And the vast majority of quote unquote successful exit founders don't get a check for 10 million.
- [40:51]
Benjamin Shapiro
Yeah, but you don't get on TechCrunch for getting 10 million bucks.
- [40:55]
Nick Zeckic
Look, if you're going for vanity, good for you, but I could give a shit. I could absolutely care less. I care about my family, I care about my health, I care about my sanity. And not having an external cap table means that I am in charge of those things. I don't have external forces dictating whether or not I get to stay sane and where I'm going to spend my time.
- [41:17]
Benjamin Shapiro
You're a preacher to the choir. I have this argument with two of my neighborhood friends all of the time. Both of them have taken outside capital and the argument is why wouldn't I take somebody else's money to figure out if this business is going to work as opposed to investing my own, which I understand in the early phases you still get a paycheck and you're figuring out if it works and you're, you know, sharing what could be a large pie with other people. That's their argument. Mine is, if I'm going to build something that's successful, why shouldn't I own and control it? I'm in your camp. I understand the other one as well. Moving on. Nick, I'm going to give you a magic lamp. And when you rub it, the blue genie comes out and he's going to say, I'm going to grant your wish for three signals that you can track for the rest of your career. Which signals do you choose?
- [42:06]
Nick Zeckic
Public filings. So SEC filings. Incredibly robust conversations about the business.
- [42:13]
Benjamin Shapiro
So you're getting, you're getting funding data. Tell me what you mean by public filings.
- [42:18]
Nick Zeckic
Yep. So 10Ks and 10Qs, they go on and have a full discussion about everything that matters in the business. Risks, concerns, upsides, projections, performance reviews. I mean, it is the executive team taking an hour to talk about how the quarter has gone and why and what they think is coming next.
- [42:39]
Benjamin Shapiro
All your public company information.
- [42:41]
Nick Zeckic
Amazing, amazing information. Line by line, items of budgets and where they're projecting them to go. I mean, really unbelievable data. And wholly underutilized, oftentimes underutilized in the HubSpot customer ecosystem because very few of them have, quote, unquote, grown up to sell to the enterprise. But as they do, I think that data is going to become ever more important. That's 1, 2. I would definitely go with executive hires. So VP and up, certainly C level and up. I would take those, those signals all day. The indicator, changing, changing guard, fresh budget eyes, you know, an indication of potentially changing strategy. Right. You can kind of look at their backgrounds and understand where they came from, the types of things they've done and built before to get an idea about where the company's going to go next. You know, the potential to change what an entire department looks like. Right. They might hire or fire based upon kind of where their brain is on various functions. So, I mean, the implications of a senior executive hire are significant. It takes a little bit more digging to understand the relevancy. I wouldn't say it's a discrete, quote unquote, alpha signal, but it's a big one. Right. Everybody should be aware of senior leadership changes in the organizations that they're selling to. I don't care what you sell and who you sell to. That's going to matter. Okay, let me see a third one that I would durably want to know. I would say M and A activity. Right. So acquisitions substantially change how an organization is going to behave and the types of problems that they're going to be facing for at least the next 18, if not 36 months. So again, larger organizations doesn't help you sell to small guys. Right? But, but I live in those large complex sale environments. That's, that's home for me and that's where I'd like to spend my time.
- [44:45]
Benjamin Shapiro
How's the company doing? Who's driving the car and what groceries did they put in the back?
- [44:54]
Nick Zeckic
That's really good. Yeah, that's pretty much it.
- [44:58]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, what's the one AI tool or capability that everyone's hyping right now that you think is going to be completely relevant in 12 months?
- [45:05]
Nick Zeckic
Months. Holy smokes. Completely irrelevant AI tool. Jeez. I, I mean I think we're living in a time where the, the answer is the tools are evolving so quickly that irrelevancy seems almost impossible to me. I think rappers, I think all the rappers are dead, right?
- [45:33]
Benjamin Shapiro
I, I, Are we talking like Tupac and biggie here?
- [45:35]
Nick Zeckic
Yeah, 100%. They're already gone. And it's really sad. And I shut up here you can see the tattoo that's here on the side.
- [45:41]
Benjamin Shapiro
I saw the P. Diddy documentary too.
- [45:43]
Nick Zeckic
Yeah, it's wow, was that something else? The so, so the AISDRs and 11Xs and all those qualifies, etc, I, I, I don't see a future for them because as soon as organizations start to get comfortable with Claud code either by hiring people who know how to do it, by reimagining how you staff a go to market organization, by having at least somebody who's a developer light on board but you really don't need one, Claude code does all that. Right? Way better with way better resolution. And at some point OpenAI is going to come up with theirs and Gemini is going to come up with theirs. Right? And I think the competition on that front is going to get really severe over the course of the next 12 months. But I think that if you're exporting your go to market process in full to the cold part of your market one, I think you should stop immediately. I think it's a waste of your time today. But I think functionally every organization is going to get to a place where they understand how to take Claude code and make it do what they thought those AISDRs were going to do for them, but actually deliver. Right? And if you put that stuff on top of a major system of record like a HubSpot or Salesforce or What? I mean, Salesforce can't do any of this stuff. At least HubSpot lets you invoke Claude and OpenAI and all the different LLMs in workflows. Right? That is an incredible unlock and if people aren't playing with that, it's huge. But I think that if you're exporting that stuff to kind of like a boxed up tool, I think you're nuts. And I think they'll all be dead. And all the VCs that put in insane amounts of money into those tools are going to be scratching their heads in 12 to 18 months the most.
- [47:27]
Benjamin Shapiro
Hey look, qualified already took the cash, they already took the exit from, from Salesforce. And you know, there's a, a large group of businesses that I think that are laggards that want to adopt AI, that are not ready to actually build with AI and I think that's what that universe of tools is for for me. I appreciate the rappers. I think that it is the hype cycle around things like claudebot or I think it's Moltbot is what they renamed it to. Where there's an agent that's gonna come in and can sophisticatedly run your entire computer and do everything for you. That's a proof of concept that will. I'm already seeing the messages now. It's like look, I created this thing and it can run my entire computer and oops, it bought a Porsche for me and booked a vacation to, you know, and it's like, hey, you might not want to give it the keys to the car and your credit card right away. But I think that that goes away because more sophisticated developers and companies will build that technology so it is protected for people that are using it. Like the full Agentix stack where you can just talk to your agent and it will go do things will be built out by sophisticated companies, not bootstrapped. So that's my answer.
- [48:48]
Nick Zeckic
I think that's right. Yeah, I think that sounds right.
- [48:51]
Benjamin Shapiro
Okay, last question. Selfish question alert. If you were targeting B2B podcasters, what signals would you use to find them?
- [49:01]
Nick Zeckic
Yeah, I. So the one that I mentioned before I actually think is great. I think finding, I think finding the white space for organizations that are otherwise investing in field which means they care about brand, their CEO and C Suite are active on LinkedIn, large followings, actively posting good engagement with their posts. Those things would tell me that they're in the right spot. And obviously if they fit the revenue profile that they could actually afford to invest in a good podcast like the ones that you guys make possible. I mean, those things, I would, I would go after that all day long. Like, I, I, I know that Chili Piper fits into that. And I can't believe they haven't thought about a podcast yet. And if they haven't, oh, my God, what an awesome opportunity, you know, to go in and broker that conversation for them and to give them a roadmap for the first 10 episodes or whatever it is. I just think that I would chase after that if I were your CRO. That's, that's what I would build tomorrow and run after that really hard.
- [49:59]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, for any other podcast producers that are looking for B2B podcasters in the marketing and technology space, that question was for you, Nick. Like I said in the intro, sometimes you meet someone, you see him across the room, and you're like, that's my person. I cannot tell you how much I agree with your philosophy, appreciate your approach, and just think that you're a sage smart marketer that understands how these systems are built for the modern time. Right now. It's a problem we're trying to solve. I hope everybody that was listening enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Thanks for coming on and being my guest.
- [50:43]
Nick Zeckic
Thanks a ton, man. This is a lot of fun. Thank you.
- [50:45]
Benjamin Shapiro
All right, that wraps up this episode of the Martech podcast. Thanks to Nick Zeckic, the chief firestarter at Smoke Signals, for joining us.
- [50:52]
Scrunch Sponsor
And a special thanks to Scrunch for sponsoring this interview. Scrunch is the AI customer experience platform that helps marketing teams understand how AI agents experience their site. They tell you how your brand shows up in LLM results, where it doesn't, and what's preventing your content from being retrieved, trusted, or recommended. And for Martech podcast listeners, Scrunch is providing a free website diagnostic that uncovers how AI sees your site, where you have content gaps, and how you're showing up versus your competition. To see how LLMs evaluate your site, go to scrunch.com that's scrunch s C R U N C H. If you'd
- [51:31]
Benjamin Shapiro
like to contact Nick, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com or you can visit his company's website. It's smokesignals AI. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or subscribe on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed every week. All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
- [52:22]
Thanks for listening to the Martech podcast and I hear everything. Production Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iheareverything.com.