Jeremy Weisz 18:05
You mentioned Mark Ritson, and it’s one of the best marketing courses you’ve ever taken. What sticks out from what you learned?
Marc Binkley 18:16
So there’s been a few times in my career where something like this has happened. And so what would it be without a Canadian talking about hockey? So at one point, I think Wayne Gretzky said this is like the game slowed down at some point for him. And he could just like that idea around, skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is. And so when you start seeing the surface of the playing field that way, you start anticipating where the puck is gonna go. You’re not as panicked anymore, and you’re not like reacting to the thing that’s right in front of you begin to skate to where the puck is going, because it’s going to go there. You’re anticipating it’s going to go there.
And then you can adjust on the fly. So having taken Mark’s course, it was one of those kind of, like, the game slowed down for me. After I took the course, I went, oh, like, this is how all the shift fits together. Like, oh, this is like, how market orientation leads into strategy, which then leads into execution through the four P’s. And I didn’t know it just slowed everything down. They could have more meaningful little conversations with anybody in any area of a business, because it opened up, I could see where they were going.
Jeremy Weisz 19:32
Would you think it’s because it was just a very specific framework that allowed his ideas to be shared. Or what do you think it is about his material that slowed things down for you?
Marc Binkley 19:47
I think a lot of it has to do with having never had formal training like there’s and even later, just last year, I finished an MBA. Yeah, and then I took an MBA level marketing course, and even during that, I still didn’t get the same level of clarity as to how marketing works that I got through his course. And I think some of that has to do with he’s got deep knowledge and extensive experience of having been in the trenches, done the things on a global scale. And he’s also just a really, he’s a little bit different in his courses. I would say he’s gentler his courses than he publicly swears as much, but just gentler. And he’s just a great teacher, like I think it’s just a combination of all those things that made the material the framework him, is the delivery of that material, the organization of the thoughts, all those kinds of things just made it really accessible and super helpful.
Jeremy Weisz 20:54
I want to talk a little bit about Quatical and your work as a CMO. And one thing that I know you have thought about when you talked about briefly before we hit record, is the 595 rule. So can you talk about that?
Marc Binkley 21:12
Yeah, so the 595 rule was really interesting one, because there’s this idea around we talk about lead gen all the time. And then we talk about demand gen, or brand building and performance, or tactical and whatever you want to call the other thing is an opposite, mental awareness, top of mind, bottom of funnel, top of funnel, all those kinds of differences. And so the 595 rule kind of looks at that. And what it basically says is that it came from research from John Dawes at narenberg bass Institute. In any given market, at any given time, there’s about 5% of the market who are currently buying today, so and that means there’s 95% of the market that isn’t buying today. So when you think about it that way, what’s compelling is that there are two jobs of marketers. One is to capture demand that’s happening now, and the other is to build future demand.
That’s a reference to James Herman’s actually got a book about that, but there’s a misconception that we can just turn on the taps, put a campaign in market and generate demand, and marketing doesn’t work quite like that. And so if you think about current demand, or in market people, and then out of market people, or future market in market people, then the idea around future demand is really important because, like, especially in a B2B scenario, it was, there’s new report that came out from Bain that said something like, I think it was 81% of all B2B buyers have a short list on day one, and the kicker is, 90% of the time they’re picking a company from the day one list. So if you’re not getting on the day one list, you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot. And so going back to wanamakers dilemma, you’re kind of like, if you only focus on lead gen, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. But it’s not to say that lead gen is the only thing that matters, or that brand building is the only thing that matters. You need both.
Jeremy Weisz 23:34
Yeah, it reminds me of Dumb and Dumber, actually. So if you’re not on the list, you don’t have a chance, but there is so…
Marc Binkley 23:40
You’re saying I got a chance.
Jeremy Weisz 23:41
Exactly. So you’re saying there’s a chance if I build demand, right?
Marc Binkley 23:49
Yeah, well, and that’s where, like, I think a lot of marketing goes wrong. Where you say…
Jeremy Weisz 23:55
You’re my new favorite guest, because you can quote Dumb and Dumber. So of all time.
Marc Binkley 24:02
Perfect. But, yeah, I think that’s where a lot of marketing goes wrong, is you make claims on things like, we’ve got a demand gen person here, and they’re going to generate demand for us. And then you that sets an expectation to somebody who doesn’t know in the executive suite that says, okay, well, we’ve got this demand gen person, this would just be a matter of time, like, give them a week. And we all know that doesn’t actually happen, because maybe sales cycles are six to 12 months. And so, you’re not manufacturing any demand. You’re just capturing the stuff that’s already in-market.
And if those people who are in-market don’t have you on their day one list, there’s a really small chance they’re going to pick you at the end anyway. So, like, setting expectations is really important, I think, especially when you’re communicating to a CFO and a CEO, head of operations, people like engineers, IT people that don’t really care that much about marketing, other than they spend a lot of money and where’s the return. So if you start setting up an expectation that the return is going to be instantaneous, you’re not going to do any favors for anybody.
Jeremy Weisz 25:20
How did Genesis Builder Group use the 595 rule?
Marc Binkley 25:25
Yeah. So that was a client I had, and one of the things we did was, when I first heard about this rule, we just looked at that and said, okay, well, is it even real? And so we, as it turned out, we had a survey in markets. We added this question within the survey to say, How soon are you looking at buying a home? And so, weirdly enough, this law held up. I mean, it was 8% that was in market in the next six months, and then the remainder, 92% that were not considering to buy in the next six months, but are will are considering to purchase, and it would be six months, plus six, 12, 18, 24 months sometime in the future. So for us, that meant a lot of things. I mean, depending on how much inventory there is available, like you might not be able to sell everything now.
And so you’re thinking about when people, those people are in-market, how are they going to remember that brand Genesis compared to all the others that are out there like so there’s things that we wanted to do to remind people, over time to think about Genesis. And we also want to try and capture as much in market demand as we could of people who are just looking for a quick possession home, let’s say, or they’re ready to make a decision now that it’s they’ve already kind of selected their geographical location, to where they wanted to go, and they just needed to a little push over the edge kind of thing. So then there’s incentives and that kind of stuff that works for them.
Jeremy Weisz 26:53
It’s interesting, Marc, you talk about this, because I just realized it’s kind of happening real time. You know, one of the podcast clients in the e-commerce world doing some consulting, and they were looking at creating, like this custom formula. And I realized I’ve been getting emails from this one company, probably for six years. I never really — at the time. I mean, until now, never had a need to introduce them to anyone or have someone use them until now, and so, like you were saying, they’ve been building that demand for six years, and now it comes through fruition that they don’t even realize. So I totally get that. Because I’m like, yeah, that company has been emailing me forever. It seems like forever. So yeah, I totally get that. So it’s important, because when the time strikes, the time strikes, and you just don’t know when it strikes.
Marc Binkley 27:58
Yeah, well, and the other thing about that that matters too is that you can do stuff like measure the category entry points of decisions that prompt people to go into market. So we did that too with Genesis Builder. And funny enough, at one point a couple, like during COVID, I thought I discovered something, and so I called it share of triggers. And then I found out later on that the amber bass Institute or published a whole bunch of books about it, and called it category entry points. So I would use that language because they’re smart and they’ve got lots of documentation around it, but it’s same kind of idea, which is to say that general awareness actually is not important. What does matter is situation awareness. So when there’s a specific trigger that’s a category entry point, you want to build awareness of your brand, memory of your brand, and this is the strategy part at the category entry points that matter for your brand.
Jeremy Weisz 29:02
I think part of that also is differentiation, uniqueness. And I want to talk. I know that you’ve helped B2B SaaS companies, and I’ve had a bunch of SaaS companies on the podcast. And there’s an instance we are talking about, about differentiation per second. Can you touch on that?
Marc Binkley 29:30
Yeah, there’s a bunch of years ago I read this great book called Differentiation. I think the author’s name is Young Me Moon, I believe. And so it was fascinating book, because it was one of those first ones, I was like, no, this can’t be like, What are you talking about? And the basic gist of the book is that in this race for differentiation, we all become the same because we’re benchmarking each other against each other and doing the exact same thing that everybody else is doing. And so we end up becoming this hurt of sameness. So, and I think that’s generally speaking, pretty true for any category, it’s really hard to maintain differentiation. It’s really hard to hold on to that. Like Tesla is a good example that launched really differentiated, one of the only EVs in the market. Now, there’s hundreds of them. A Tesla would always say, we’re never going to advertise yet.
At the same time, Elon Musk owns rocket ships, and would put a Tesla inside the rocket ship, send it to moon, broadcasted it everywhere and like so yeah, not marketing budget, maybe, but not every company’s got a couple billion dollars for PR stunts. So there’s all those kinds of things that, and then even with them, now, they’re starting to advertise a lot more because there’s a lot more competition. So holding on a differentiation is really hard, but there’s a lot of benefits to it, if you can do it, at the very least, if you can remain distinctive in the way that you brand yourselves, in the way that creative looks and feels, and if it matches your website and matches the customer experience on the back end, and they see it, and all the signage and logo and events and trade shows and all that kind of thing, then the distinctiveness will certainly is mandatory and is absolutely necessary, whereas differentiation isn’t always sustainable.
So coming back to the original question, there’s a lot of companies that end up trying to benchmark each other and doing this exact same thing. So they end up using the same stock images looking at the same product in use. We have our list of features. They have their list of features. Here’s our list of features compared to their list of features. And so it ends up looking identical. And so I think that’s a challenge and really, there’s also some more research that came out recently called the cost of dull when you do that kind of stuff, it ends up just washing out, like it’s very boring, very dull. And in that cost of dull report, what they found is that there is a ton of value in standing out and being truly different. A lot of that, especially in B2B, has to do with connecting with people emotionally, which is kind of different for B2B, like, the idea of, I don’t mean like, emotionally as in, like, make people cry. I just mean, like, sometimes it’s just a smirk, sometimes it’s a nudge, sometimes it’s like a wink, that kind of emotion. But the idea of, nobody got fired for buying IBM, it matters a lot, so that’s the number one reason why B2B buyers pick anything is that they’re not going to get fired.
They’re not afraid to make the wrong call. Because decision making groups are so big, and everybody’s got so much influence. And you’re talking about not just like, I bought the wrong flavor of pizza. You were talking about, like this system we just bought that we spent a few billion dollars on in 10 years, implementing is actually not the right thing. And so now you’re fired, because this is a terrible decision. So there’s a ton of emotion in B2B, and I think connecting with people emotionally is a really important thing. Most B2B companies don’t do it. So if you are looking at standing out, that’s one of the ways you can stand out. Does not focus on features. But just focus on making the piece person feel more comfortable and more trustworthy that they’re not going to get fired for having picked your brand.
Jeremy Weisz 33:33
In that SaaS example, how are they, even though a lot of the companies like you were mentioning, if you look at the benefits and you compare they are doing similar things, will be an example of a different or how you’ve seen, like, a SaaS company or company differentiate, specifically?
Marc Binkley 33:58
One of the things that we did was look at how they currently were segmenting the market. So they go by industry vertical, which is what everybody does. So you go like, construction, manufacturing, you name engineering, whatever the thing is, legal services, and that’s what everybody does. But then you can also look at the market segment differently and say, well, what are the jobs people are trying to get done, and where are their unmet needs? And it doesn’t matter if it’s in any specific category or not, or industry vertical, because there could be a lot of similarities between categories for those things. So that’s one of the first things you could do to start that and be different, is to look at the market differently, again through that lens of market orientation. And then from there, it would be a matter of not having a lot of the same stock imagery of product in use, the same kind of thing as we’ve been around for so long we’ve. Established in whatever it was in 1898 or something like that, and really just focus on the needs that the customer has, and focus on what matters to them, and say how you can help.
Jeremy Weisz 35:15
You talk Marc about evidence based marketing, right? You come from a science related background. Give some example or an example of what you mean by evidence based marketing.
Marc Binkley 35:29
Yeah. So there’s a thing in marketing, I would say that most people know about, which is it costs five times as much to make a customer that does to keep or that does to keep one. So we all say that like it’s gospel. And there’s a majority of people that would say that, they build businesses around that. And so then there’s a whole bunch of things, like loyalty programs that we invest in. When we do that kind of thing, we talk about customer retention. We talk about the importance of upselling and cross selling, largely because of that statement. When you look under the hood of that statement, it’s actually a thought experiment that had really bad statistical validity. There was none, and there’s no actual research that went into it is just an idea, but it’s a really catchy statement, and it’s stuck, and then it’s printed in every — all 17 editions of Cutler’s textbook.
And so we all say it, and we all accept it as though it’s back. So there is zero proof behind that. And even if it were true, what does it even mean? Really? Like, as we just talked about with that example of sales, like, you’re going to churn out customers, it’s impossible not to over time. And so churn isn’t necessarily the problem. It’s acquiring more customers that’s a problem. So even if it did cost five times more, you can’t avoid acquiring more customers because you like, for like, people die. Businesses go like, I don’t mean to sound so dramatic, but there’s a whole bunch of reasons, good ones that have nothing to do with you, as to why a company or you’re not going to have a customer forever. So a big thing in terms of the laws of marketing that exist out there is that that’s one of the laws of marketing, is that in a lot of cases, you will not have a lot of cases, every brand needs to acquire more customers in order to keep growing.
Jeremy Weisz 37:41
When we’re speaking of this topic, it makes me think of some of my favorite books. One book in particular, Predictably Irrational. Oh yeah, and you had Dan Ariely yeah on the podcast, one of my favorite authors. And that’s one of my favorite books. I probably listen to it once a year on Audible talk about, I don’t know if there’s anything that came out of the podcast episode that was interesting, or just some of the things that you’ve learned from Dan Ariely,
Marc Binkley 38:19
Yeah, I mean, so he’s got this new book called Misbelief, and so that’s what we mostly talk to him about. But there’s some really, like, he’s just such a — he’s obviously very smart, very thoughtful and all that kind of stuff. So we were kind of hanging off every word that he had. When I really listen to that podcast. Now I get — at the same, like you mentioned earlier, like I listen to certain things a lot, because I find, depending on my state of mind, I learn different things from the same material. So one of the things that he had talked about at the beginning was something he talked about in one of his TED Talks way back when, which was this idea of pricing. There’s an economist case study that he had worked on. So he saw this ad for the economist, and it was that you can ask the Economist Ad was you can get a subscription digital only for, let’s say it was 50 bucks. Print only was 100 print plus digital was 100 this is like, that’s weird. That’s purely a mistake.
So he tried to get some information from them. They didn’t reply. And then he’s like, well, let me just run an experiment, see what happens. So, as you might imagine, the print plus the digital was what most people picked. It was something like, let’s call it 90 to 95% of the people they surveyed said they picked that option. So very few people picked the online version, and nobody picked the Print only option, which kind of makes sense, because you’re like, why would I bother? So then he’s like, well, let’s remove the print only option. And probably the answer is going to be the same, except it wasn’t, which is crazy, and this is where we’re predictably irrational, because all of a sudden it was something like 40 ish percent of people then picked the digital only subscription, and 60% then picked the Digital Plus print.
And so the rationale behind that is there’s sometimes like we think our choices are our own, but in fact, people guide our choices A lot of times because of the things they’re putting in front of us. So this print only option wasn’t there for anybody to pick. It was there for you to compare. It was like a dummy option, but it added a creative perceived value, so much higher for the combo offer that most people pick the combo offer.
Jeremy Weisz 40:49
His stuff is fascinating. Is there anything else that sticks out from them?
Marc Binkley 40:55
Yeah, there’s another part that he talked about, where the they he’s got an index fund, actually, which is based on people’s studies that he’s done in organizations, and they measure the company’s level of intrinsic motivation within a company. That’s the only thing they measure. And based on that, companies that score high get into his index fund, and that index fund outperforms the SMP 500 over the last two and a half years. I think it was since they’ve launched it, which is kind of crazy when you think about it, because he’s not looking at financials at all. They’re just purely picking companies that have a really high intrinsic motivation of employees.
So it’s kind of one of those ones. You’re like, I hear you got to go back and listen to that again, because I need to think more about how that happens. But I think for any of us that are trying to run a business, you want people to feel inspired. You feel good about the thing. Because it’s never just about the money, it’s always about something else. And when that something else is in there, then it only is about the money.
Jeremy Weisz 42:11
Yeah, his books are fascinating, so I encourage people to check it out. Marc, I have one last question, before I ask it, I want to encourage people. You can check out more at quatical.com. He has a link also to the podcast, which is The Sleeping Barber Podcast. And also, you can check out the Calgary CMA just to learn what they’re doing, because all that stuff can be applied to any business as well. My last question Marc is just, you mentioned some, some great books and resources, with Dan Ariely and in the marketing book of the mark risen, what are some of your other favorite books and resources that people should check out that you’ve learned from in marketing or business?
Marc Binkley 43:10
Yeah, totally. I mean, you have to start with Aaron Burr Bass Institute and how brands grow. They’ve got tons of great stuff. That book is amazing. It’s not an easy what is it called? How Brands Grow. There’s part one, part two. Got it. But really, anything that they produce is amazing. That was kind of a yeah, those books are really amazing. And then there’s like, the B2B Institute’s great. The work is great. The Swedish advertising Federation that I had mentioned, fair. J, I can’t ever pronounce the name. It’s fair and J, annual So, or something like that. I get trying to throw an accent in there to make it sound like what I’m saying. But those are awesome. Yeah, they’re great. And I think from Roger Martin is Unbelievable. Our podcast is a big part of what we’ve been trying to do is build up a library of all of these people and all these brands and all these companies that have been producing this type of evidence and have them on the podcast. So our podcast has a lot of these people too that would interest anybody. But I’d start with — yeah, those ones that I mentioned.
Jeremy Weisz 44:21
love it. Marc, I wanna be the first one to thank you and everyone. Check out the websites they mentioned, check out the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Marc, thanks so much.
Marc Binkley 44:34
Thank you.
