Ben Beck, PhD MBA

Stephen Thiele and our team have seen a lot of mistakes companies make when integrating HubSpot and Salesforce. But one simple strategy to get the most out of the integration is this - clean the data from the outset. Believe me - no company's data is as clean as they wish it to be. If you address this challenge before connecting the systems together, it will save a lot of headaches. Here's a link to our full video on one of the most common HubSpot <> Salesforce Integration issues - Getting the Initial Architecture Right https://lnkd.in/gieNpcGj #hubspot #salesforce #integrations

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Ryan Westwood has been involved in 100 companies as an operator, investor, board member and advisor. He grew his last company to over $650m in revenue. His current company has quickly become THE RevOps platform. He’s played a big role in putting the Utah tech scene on the map. Ryan dropped so much knowledge in an hour. It’s impossible to summarize it all… but I promise it’s worth the listen. Ryan Westwood, Chairman and CEO at Fullcast, The Go-to-Market Cloud, is my guest for this week’s episode of Not Another CEO Podcast. I was introduced to Ryan by Nick Cromydas. On our first 30 minute call I ended up taking two pages of notes. Ryan’s obviously had amazing success over the course of his career. But what I appreciate the most is how thoughtful and deliberate he is about how to build a business and the ability he has to boil his strategies and tactics down into easy to understand nuggets. My highlights from this episode are: Taking 6 months to get into CEO shape - After selling his last company, Simplus, Ryan spent time investing, serving on boards and advising companies. Basically everything but operating a company. When he and his co-founders bought FullCast and he took over as CEO he had to get back in CEO shape. Everything from the hours he had to work, the number of decisions he had  to make on a daily basis, the dynamics with his family, his own health, really everything. Good reminder… the CEO job is hard. Talking to 60 RevOps leaders in two quarters - To understand his ICP and ideal buyer persona, Ryan met with 60 RevOps leaders in his first two quarters as CEO of FullCast. He learned so much about the persona he was building for, the way they think, what they’re responsible for, the challenges they face. By the end of those two quarters he felt like he was one of them. It’s such a simple thing, talk to your customers, but I don’t think founders/CEOs do this enough, both in the number of customers and the frequency. The power of the dream team - Ryan’s three co-founders are people he’s worked with before… for over a decade. He talked about how he’s been keeping a spreadsheet of every person he’s interacted with over the course of his career that he wanted to work with again and when it came time to recruit his founding team he knew exactly who he was going to approach and he was able to assemble the dream team. There is so much more: the power in a cap table, running a board meeting, product roadmap prioritization, defining an ICP, missing hip hop when he moved from Philly to Provo, why we’re seeing so many success stories coming out of Utah and more. Here are the links to the full episode: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/ey3AKu5w Spotify: https://lnkd.in/emKyjsBF Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eyXUJHvn If you enjoy the episode, please like and subscribe on your favorite platforms and share with your networks.

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If I could only look at one metric forever to evaluate my new customer acquisition, it would be this one... First Order Value/nCAC 🚨 This is a ratio, not an absolute number, expressed as a percentage. I mentioned this number in my last post about the "eCommerce scorecard." This ratio includes two metrics: 1. First Order Value Profit - Take the average first order value and subtract the costs to deliver this order to your customers. This gives you the first-order gross profit. 2. nCAC - The average amount you are paying to acquire a net new customer. By dividing the former by the latter, you get a number expressed as a percentage. When this number is over 100%, it means that your first order is not costing you a penny. It covers all costs to acquire the new customer and deliver the first order. If it's below 100%, for every dollar spent on new customer acquisition, you are losing some money... For most bootstrapped eCom brands that are in scaling mode, this number should probably always be as close to 100% as possible. This ensures you are in the perfect balance of not burning money and not leaving potential growth on the table. Have you ever heard of this KPI before? 👀 #kpis #ecommerce #newcustomer

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Utah Agencies are laying people off...... It makes me sad, and I want to help. The agency model is dying........ With the power of AI, it's all about consolidating and controlling where/what you can. 😎 Creative 😎 Messaging 😎 Audiences That's really it. You can pull a few levers, but any good ad buyer should have already done this. Now the best way to better performances is communicating effectively on what is working and what isn't, and continually improving. Leaning into AI and automations is CRITICAL! I'm amazed at what our team of 3 can do! We handle +$500k/month in ad spend. We make our clients millions. And we work out of my house...... We don't have a super cool studio. We don't have a stellar website. BUT! We keep growing and growing and growing. PLUS, we're more profitable then ever. It's almost like anyone with a computer can do our job....... so the best way to standout, is to do the job better than anyone. For example, We create relatively few campaigns, and instead focus our time & energy into quality. We test meaningfully. Strategize from statistically significant data. Execute like a Navy Seal Team. That's really it...... Don't let some big agency tell you they have the "secret sauce". They don't, or their wouldn't be layoffs...... Know anyone laid off by a large marketing agency? Send them my way. I'd love to show them how to find work directly with companies, either in-house or through freelance work. *chocolate is there to cover our secret sauce....jk"

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One thing I didn't expect with the Your Path to Publish podcast launch this week is how fun it would be to read the review nicknames. Here are some of my favorites. Marketingmislead Utah-801 Money please! Your Auntie M Narhal 25 Grundleman Skippingrocks Eggcelent Educellence Fearless Warrior ThunderCastle SpecialK11 Yokobo1994 #podcastlaunch #podcast #podcastreviews #bookpublishing #bookwriting #author #authorlife

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Very few companies in the lead gen space have a solid solution for dynamic consent—and I think I've figured out why. There’s a noticeable gap between the lead distribution/CRM side and the lead form tool side. On one hand, many lead distribution tools and CRM providers actually have created solutions and have been working very hard. But the responsibility to make it easy to implement falls on the form provider side (form tools and landing page providers). Unless the forms are native to the lead distribution tool or CRM. On the other hand, many form/funnel providers either: 1) Don’t see enough demand from their ICP to justify the extra effort, 2) Aren’t aware of emerging 1:1 consent requirements, or 3) Simply don’t know how to handle these new standards (to be fair, it's confusing) This misalignment has led to fragmented solutions. Some solutions do exist, but most require clunky integrations that I believe will ultimately hurt conversion rates and drive up CPLs. What the industry really needs is a lead capture tool that fully embraces compliance and offers seamless cross-platform consent-based interoperability via a universal API—something we’ve achieved at LeadCaptureIO. Here’s an example using LeadByte, though this applies to any distribution tool). - Flip a switch to activate dynamic consent. - Add the fields you need to send over. - Instantly post state or ZIP code to the distribution tool (in this case LeadByte) - Retrieve a lead payload in the form in a fraction of a second. Ping/Post style - Dynamically insert the appropriate company or agent name into the disclaimer checkbox, driven by logic in the distribution tool or CRM. It can handle multiple checkboxes, single checkboxes, or no checkboxes at all—any setup you need. No frankensteining shit together. We’ve figured out this compliance thing and LeadCaptureIO will begin to emerge as the most compliance focused lead capture platform in 2025 and beyond. This is just the start... I'm not even touching on our compliance tagging system that we just launched and what's to come with blockchain.

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Are your HubSpot email open rates going down and you need to fix it-- FAST? These four things set the foundation for deliverability and you need to make sure your emails are set up correctly so they end up in the inbox, not spam.

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No, this is not my tech stack. Yes, it's overcomplicated. But here's why... I recently helped a client automate their profitable (but manual) webinar system. They are getting money and getting burned out at the same time. They need relief from the process but also need to continue to generate profit. A true case for automation. Here's some insight into my approach: 1️⃣ 𝗟𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗲𝘅𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵. Don't rush to new tools. Work with what's there, especially when you're just starting out. 2️⃣ 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻, 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲. Instead of taking over, I trained their ops manager. This builds internal capacity and keeps the client in control. 3️⃣ 𝗦𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗱𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆. Sometimes, keeping familiar processes is better than introducing new ones. Minimal changes can lead to maximum adoption. 4️⃣ 𝗘𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺. By guiding their marketing person to build the system, they now understand and can manage it independently. The result? A streamlined, automated webinar system that the client's team fully owns and operates. Did I mention how thankful their marketer was? Went from imposter syndrome to "it's possible!". They got the help and expert guidance that they didn't know how to ask for and I provided a safe space for them to be "dumb" without judgement. Do me a favor...check in on your marketing person. They may be more overwhelmed than you realize. Better yet, they may be one resource away from having their true potential unlocked for your business. If you feel your tech person could they use some training to automate your business more effectively? Let's have a conversation about it...

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My favorite feature in Gong might surprise you and will likely make their product team facepalm 🤦‍♂️ Drum roll 🥁... Call Recordings I've listened to 219 calls YTD. Believe it or not, I was an attendee on the majority of the calls I listened to. Don't get me wrong, the automated call summaries that Gong spits out are top-notch. However, nothing compares to hearing (and watching) word-for-word what a prospect is saying and how they react to specific topics. My core use case is watching historical calls on my second monitor as I build out pitch presentations. This is my secret sauce for creating perfectly aligned pitches that resonate with prospects and has resulted in a 45% pitch>close conversion rate YTD. LinkedIn is full of tech recommendations, but I want to hear from you. What "feature" within your tech stack can you not live without? Share in the comments below! #Gong #CallRecordings #Productivity #SalesInsights

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I was on a CMO Slack channel yesterday offering free templates to help marketers. I mentor a great deal and know that it is a challenging time where many need support. Within minutes on this channel I was berated by several high-profile marketers to post in a less-seen part of the channel and discounting the value and well-intention of my offering. I literally had to delete something free to then help no one. We have reached a low point in our society when being kind elicits an anger response. With this post I send out a HUGE HUG to dissipate the frustration of marketers around the globe. If you are a marketer having a hard time or you are witness to one that is struggling, please message me. Please comment if you are seeing this too and like/share this post to help me send support to marketers who have a really tough job right now or are on the market looking for their next opportunity.... #marketinglove #cmos #marketing #marketingjobs

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Does your CEO really want to know how many MQLs and SQLs your marketing produced this month? Probably not. Today's marketing playbook vastly differs from the one that worked so well two years ago, including what gets reported internally. I was recently invited to speak to the Arizona Innovation Marketing Association, and I chose to discuss how my marketing playbook has changed. In my talk, which I titled, "The Rebellion of ROI: Why It's Time to Throw Out Traditional Marketing Playbooks," I shared five game-changing shifts forcing a complete rethink of the playbooks we used two, even five years ago. And the first big shift is to admit your CEO doesn't care about MQL's or SQL's. I call it a shift because they used to care about them. Not that long ago, marketing teams were being told Sales needs more "top of funnel LEADS." So Marketers created a bunch of gated assets and threw a gazillion "Marketing-Qualified Leads" over the wall to Sales. Except they quickly learned that someone downloading an eBook is almost never ready to book a sales demo. And in the end, while Marketing could claim success by generating thousands of leads, CEO's and CFO's were focused on driving revenue, not leads. This led to questions like "so how many leads do we need to produce $X in revenue?" In Q2 of last year, I stopped reporting lead numbers. The traditional "MQL" was simply too disconnected from revenue. At the same time, we also took the radical step of ungating all of our assets, which naturally caused our lead count to plunge. Instead, I shifted to reporting inbound pipeline and outbound pipeline produced through marketing outreach efforts (our SDR sits in Marketing, not Sales). The only leading indicator we report is inbound demo requests. Guess what? I've not been asked for MQL or SQL counts in more than a year. The reality is investors are no longer funding growth without profitability, so aligning our marketing efforts to revenue helped prove that our modest marketing investments are producing pipeline. Reporting on pipeline also enables us to report Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) tied to pipeline and revenue (10X and 29X respectively for last year). How has your marketing reporting changed in the last two years?

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🔥 HOT 🔥 new playbook for ya: Customer Love Escalation The legend of all Customer Marketer legends, Christina Garnett, EMBA, dropped some heat in this week's episode - "Fanning the Flames." If we have escalation process for when things go wrong, why don't we have escalation processes for when things go RIGHT? Your fans, evangelists, & your customers are the NOS to your connected brand engine. They'll take your efforts from 0 to 60 in less than 60 seconds. So we should absolutely be finding ways to celebrate, hype, uplift, and party with our customers. If you're looking for more ways to boost your connection to your customers, you're gonna want to catch week's episode of Connected Brand. Christina drops so much knowledge, you're gonna need a rent fork lift to carry away all of these insights. Wanna catch the full episode? 🎧 Listen: https://hubs.li/Q02tMGTj0 📹 Watch: https://hubs.li/Q02tMDd70

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🎺 LET'S GO! 🎉 The Salt Lake City Marketing Technology Conference for 2024 is HERE! My good friend, Trent Cross and I have been running this event for the last 10 years and each and every year, I'm amazed at the people, companies and others that turn out to help us all connect, learn, and grow. Marketing technology is perhaps one of the most difficult, and yet most important parts of modern marketing and so this year, we're leaning into that celebration of connection and expanding our audience. This year, we’re partnering with RevOps and SalesOps groups from across the Silicon Slopes to have the discussion we all desperately need to have — how do we integrate systems, processes and people across MarketingOps, SalesOps and RevOps to maximize efficiency and help organizations grow? If you've ever sat in a room with all those groups and tried to figure out how to blend complex systems, you know how frustrating that can be. This year, we're tackling it head on. Collaboration and integration are long discussed topics that are more than just a few nice buzzwords. The integration of systems and the sharing of data across those systems isn’t just a nice idea. Now, it is clearly the future of all Ops Practitioners and we want you to hear from the most seasoned technicians and leaders in Ops to see how they are preparing for the sea change in technology. And you can be a part of all of it. Join us for the conference on December 11, 2024 to discover just how much connecting the dots can drive success for you and your organization. Hope to see you there! Register soon because space is limited! Thanks to our sponsors: Knak, Mobly, Pearagon , ON24, Syncari, Data Dev Design, and Stack Moxie Registration Link: https://lnkd.in/gQvZ8dMx P.S. We still have room for a couple more sponsors. If you want to get your business in front of the largest group of Ops Practitioners at the highest levels of organizations along the Silicon Slopes, you can't beat this event. It's inexpensive, effective and Trent and I are really, really nice people. 😁

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Many companies have a hard time keeping up with their automation program. Questions continuously pop up like: Which ones are on? Which ones are paused that shouldn't be? Who worked on this one? Why is this titled wrong? I found two easy ways to keep automations simple and organized. 1. Institute a naming system for the automation title. It could be something as simple as [INITIALS] [TITLE] [YEAR] or something complex like [YEAR] [INITIALS] [TITLE] [DIVISION] [BRANCH]. Any of this helps to save time when searching. 2. Build and maintain an automation tracker. I found this to be a lifesaver when you are building automations for your clients and everyone needs to be aligned. The tracker can be a simple Google Doc that is shared with all stakeholders to know which ones are live, which ones are completed, which ones are in queue, etc. Knowing this helps to build a pipeline for future automations to be built in a timely matter. Here's to a more efficient week! #automation #candidateengagement #marketingautomation

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The great positioning fallacy is that the best product wins. We all scoff and say, "Of course, Salesforce isn't the best CRM!"...but then when we go sell our own products we say things like: "We're a better ____ for ____." "We're a better way to ______." "We're better than _____ at ____." At its very best, positioning is about aligning your strongest competitive advantages with your buyers' decision-making process. That's why when I do positioning work, I look at three additional dimensions beyond product capabilities (i.e., what makes a product "better" at doing the job). I look at... - Credibility (why buyers should trust you with their money) - Convenience (what makes a product easier to buy) - Cost (the relative expense associated with buying something) If positioning is about showing up in your ideal buyers' world as the best option, then make sure you really understand how your buyers evaluate their options and shape your message accordingly.

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Sometimes frustration boils over when people discover refund policies they didn’t read or understand—like a recent incident in Utah, where a man drove his car into the front of a dealership. How can we avoid these situations? My latest Substack post explores this issue with real consumer stories and practical insights. Let’s talk about smarter buying and better communication. ✍️ Check it out! https://lnkd.in/duYvgX8Q 📰News: https://lnkd.in/d_CwvQZB

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Are you overpaying for dead weight in your CRM? Before your next HubSpot renewal, clean up your contact database. Why pay for inactive, duplicate, unsubscribed contacts that only bloat your costs? A little data housekeeping could save you thousands—money better spent on growing your business. 💡 Actionable tip: Set aside time for a quarterly contact audit. #HubSpotTricksAndTips #DatabaseManagement #MarketingAutomation

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Nailing your positioning requires honesty. Not just about who you’re for, but why you win. This is the biggest pitfall of typical B2B positioning exercises. We let our haste and egos blind us to the real reasons we win (...and lose.) The default is to assume that all success and failure in the marketplace results from what our product does or does not do. But if you take a step back and read the room, you’ll very likely see that most of the time, factors other than product capabilities separate the winners from the losers. (I will follow up with a post giving examples of this. There are many.) With my clients, I like to look at four things. Capability, credibility, convenience, and cost. The capabilities the product unlocks for buyers and users, along with the features that unlock them, is where we start. But then we keep going. We think about the unique attributes that make us especially credible. We think about how our go-to-market and buying experience makes us especially convenient. We think about how our price, pricing model, and the tools and processes we displace or improve result in genuinely greater value relative to the cost of our product. Then, we distill down to the most meaningful, unique factors that set us apart and win deals. Doing this will make your positioning work harder. It will add some time and force you to confront realities you might not love. But I can say from experience, it’s enormously helpful.

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As an avid listener of the #RadicallyTransparent podcast, I felt compelled to share this: If you’re stuck in a cycle of “more blogs,” “more videos,” and “more SEO” without moving the needle, this episode featuring Christopher Peer may be one for the books. Chris, CEO of SyncShow and Author of the book "The Great 8 Pillars of ROI-Driven Marketing", has scaled hundreds of companies and earned spots on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies twice! In this episode, Chris challenges the “do more” mindset, offering a refreshing approach to focusing on what will actually yield meaningful results. Spoiler alert: It may not be your tactics, but your operational structure 😱 ***** The key takeaway for me? Stop chasing ‘more.’ Start doing what matters. If you’re ready to break free from tactical chaos and embrace strategic marketing, don’t miss this conversation. 🔗 Link to listen: https://okt.to/hwWzgM What’s helped you move past the “whack-a-mole” trap? Let’s chat in the comments! 👇 #MarketingTips

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