Funnel Reboot

Episode 204

Eyes are important. Each of us puts heavy weight on our vision when forming a mental model of the world around us.Seeing is believing. This is so important in business, almost every time people meet, some visual tool guides the discussion – this practically essential object is a presentation, specifically a data presentation.

But knowing what we know about our visual senses, creating something that’s tuned for people’s minds…as well as their hearts, takes combining neuroscience, storytelling, emotion, persuasion, design and effective communication.

That’s a lot to know, but our guest can help you do it. For over a decade, she’s helped those in the digital marketing and web analytics communities transform their  presentations from snoozefests into experiences that inspire action

She’s a workshop leader and keynote speaker. We’re going to talk about the book she came out with in 2024 “Present Beyond Measure.”  Let’s go south of NYC to the Jersey shore to talk with Lea Pica.

Chapter Timestamps:

0:00:00   Intro

00:04:23 Welcome Lea Pica

00:09:42 know the stakeholders you are presenting to

00:18:04 Building meeting’s name around message

00:32:14 PSA

00:33:07 Parsing your content into digestible-sized ideas

00:40:08 using story arc structure to make slides

00:48:05 keeping data accurate in graphs

01:01:27 Listener-exclusive offer by Lea

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

 Lea Pica’s website

The Present Beyond Measure podcast

The Book can be found on her site or on Goodreads:

Present Beyond Measure: Design, Visualize, and Deliver Data Stories That Inspire Action

Lea on LinkedIn

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Episode 202

One of the most famous western philosophers of all time is GWF Hegel. He influenced other thinkers like Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. He lectured at the universities of Jena, Heidelberg and from 1818 until 1831, at Berlin. As a matter of fact, his lectures there drew students from all over campus, to the point that the belltower at the University would sound its bell to announce the start of Hegel’s lectures

People may have flocked to hear him, but that doesn’t mean they understood Hegel. One student who went on to write a biography of him was Karl Rosenkranz, who said “His lectures were not clear and systematic presentations, but profound expositions of the inner movement of concepts, which often raised more questions than they answered”…..in another part, he said “The students often complained that Hegel was difficult to understand.”

Many moons ago, I was a Political Science major, in which I had to take a philosophy course that covered Hegel – I had the toughest time understanding him and Hegel still confuses me  to this day. I read & re-read his words, but I don’t get what he’s saying.

Same with Superintelligent AI like ChatGPT – when we ask it questions, there always seems to be a randomness factor. Sometimes it gives you amazing results, while other times it leaves you scratching your head at its hallucinations…its stupidity.

If you have this problem, it might not be the AI—it might be your prompts! There are hacks to how you craft them – and this has given rise to a whole field – prompt engineering.

Our guest co-founded a 50 person marketing agency called Ladder. He has designed courses on LinkedIn Learning & Udemy that 350,000 people have taken. And he was a very early user of Large Language Models – the brains behind Generative AI.

In 2023 he came on Ep 168 of this show for the book “Marketing Memetics.” In 2024 he came out with an O’Reilly book titled: Prompt Engineering for Generative AI. Let’s go to Liverpool, England to talk with Mike Taylor.

Chapter Timestamps

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:28 Welcome Mike

00:11:27 Expressing all that’s needed for a GPT to produce good response

00:20:24 Using AI context window

00:34:48 PSA

00:35:26 Training GPT on proprietary data

00:41:19 Agentic use of GPT

00:47:52 Training GPT for writing

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

GWF Hegel

Marketing Memetics, with Mike Taylor – Funnel Reboot

Mike on Twitter

Mike on Linkedin

Mike’s LinkedIn courses

Mike’s Udemy courses

Microsoft GitHub

McDonald’s

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Episode 201

While our guest wasn’t the one who invented content marketing, by founding the Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi became its standard-bearer. For decades now he has shown marketers how to make their marketing better by building a media presence that directly connects them to their audience.

These days, Joe is saying this model applies to a much wider populace. He’s showing how individuals can make a go of having businesses that are 100% content-based. He’s urging these people, formerly known as the audience, to go make their own audience. He calls this type of person a content entrepreneur.

This business model’s definition has two criteria. First is that content is the vehicle used to market the product. We all know this as Content Marketing. It lets buyers take samplings of a business model where they present the skills they’ve acquired and

The next criteria – content must also be the product. Unlike experts who work full-time as a teacher, writer or consultant who sell their expertise based on their own time – be it in increments of hours or years.

Content entrepreneurs get to craft and sell multiple products without committing their time. Instead, they sell newsletters, courses, books, community-access and other products to the point their audience consumes so actively, it generates high-enough earnings to support Their livelihood. It’s possible today to form an entrepreneurial venture based completely on content.

This isn’t exactly a typical Funnel Reboot topic, but we have just surpassed 200 shows and now that we’re starting on a new bicentenary. Let’s use this chance to go in a different direction, try something new.

So listen in as we go to Cleveland Ohio to speak a second time with our guest, and founder of Tilt Publishing, Joe Pulizzi.

Timestamps/Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
00:04:41 Origins of the Content Entrepreneur idea
00:11:21 Content mktg’s more than a wrapper
00:20:27 Audience vs community
00:23:11 PSA
00:23:52 Thinking of offers for your audience
00:31:13 Having media calendars
00:36:11 Business model may incorporate web3
00:45:34 About CEX & Joe’s book

People/Products mentioned in the show:

The Content Entrepreneur book

Content Entrepreneur Expo

Joe’s LinkedIn profile

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Episode 198

A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It’s not that buyers aren’t buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won’t even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival’s product. Only the winning vendor knows that that account uses them for that specific function in their technology stack. All other companies are in the dark.  

But are they really? Another way to look at this is that every vendor has information that could be valuable to others. You can find many buyers stacks with products having some overlap but that largely complement each other. As proof, note that lots of these products even integrate with each other because of buyer demand. 

Should vendors consider collaborating with vendors they compete against? Aren’t we supposed to hate the competition?

We don’t have to. A famous example of that was Apple’s announcement in 1997 of the deal it struck with Microsoft. Steve Jobs defended the deal saying  “If we want to move forward…we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”

Zooming to today’s reality, It makes a lot of sense for vendors to collaborate as part of an Ecosystem. By pooling their data together with their indirect competitors, they can see internal buying patterns. Those vendors who hitch their data wagons together get around the ‘nobody talks to our sales rep’ problem, because one of their partners already has the info that rep needs. Using this intel helps them come first in the race for their product to be selected to go in the buyer’s stack. 

Our guest today got a Science & Engineering degree from Princeton University and after a stint in the investment world, he dove into co-founding startups. The first was business intelligence platform RJMetrics and the other was cloud data pipeline company Stitch, both of which he saw through to successful exits. 

His latest role is as Co-Founder of a platform that safely shares data among companies for this kind of partner-based selling.

Outside of work, He is a Trustee for one of America’s top centers of science education and development And an improv comedy performer, in a  team that has performed over 100 shows together.

This husband, father of two, is very proud to call Philadelphia home. Let’s head there now to meet Bob Moore.

Timestamps / Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:46 Bob’s thesis on how sales is broken

00:11:21 Ecosystems are cause for hope

00:26:13 PSA

00:26:53 Revamping corporate partner practices

00:31:38 Pooling together data

00:55:06 Contacting Bob

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Ecosystem-Led Growth book

Bob on X

Bob on LinkedIn 

Bob is formerly Co-founder of Stitch Data

Bob is currently CEO at Crossbeam

Metcalfe’s Law

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